It’s been just over six months since The Leaf Library released the melancholic indie kraut-pop opus After the Rain, Strange Seeds, but the London-based quartet are straight back on the horse with Library Music: Volume Two, a collection of material recorded at various points over the last decade or so. It acts as a kind of sequel to 2022’s Volume One, but the sonic range is wider and therefore more indicative of the uninhibited way in which The Leaf Library approach music-making.
Rather than a hastily thrown-together collection of bits and bobs, this is compilation as curation, the evidence of a band’s creative workings arranged and displayed with skill and care, and presented as a genuine alternative to a traditional album. The disparate nature of these tracks is part of their appeal: at one end of the scale is the 22-minute Versatile Clouds, whose title and length might fool you into thinking you’ll hear something akin to early Stereolab at their most kraut-ish. But while there is some debt to the Groop’s fluttering, pulsing dynamic, Versatile Clouds builds and grows in an altogether more organic way, utilising gorgeous swathes of strings and hints of early-2000s folktronica. This softens the song’s percussive edges, resulting in something dreamy, a hazed vision of the future glimpsed in another room. The drums dip in and out, leaving gaps for ambient rumination, acoustic reverie and electronic experimentation. This track alone serves as a kind of compendium of the band’s many influences. In stark contrast are the minute-long Everyone I Met Today and the equally brief Harmonic Runout, which serve as terse harmonic and rhythmic experiments.
The Long Dead King sees the band immersed in the kind of extended electro-kraut/psych-pop that will make fans of Jane Weaver swoon. Kate Gibson’s vocals are detached but engaging, while the synths create an atmosphere at once eerie and expansive, like a disco in a burial mound. Building Better Worlds begins with ominous drumming and a synth that seems like it’s burrowing into your skull, before Gibson’s distant chant introduces a mystic quality that remains through the song’s twelve minutes of shifting tempos and dense harmonics.
Things aren’t always so heavy. Opener Flowers at the Border is a perfect slice of lilting electro-pop, Bowed Clusters is soaked in a restrained indie melancholy, and I Learned to Swim Underwater creates a perfectly subaquatic soundworld, with Gibson’s vocals cutting through the abyssal depths with startling clarity. These three songs and The Long Dead King make up the album’s opening quartet, and were originally released together as an EP in 2024. After this opening salvo, the collection sparks off in multiple directions: Kendrick Road sees them bolster the melodic indietronica blueprint with autumnal neo-classical flourishes and minimal piano, and Wintergreen’s remix of Sailing Day is intriguingly chopped-up and blippy.
The instrumental Bells and Thread plays around with jazzy time signatures and a loose-limbed, exploratory bass line, and No Memories, No Plans hides a hauntological conceit behind shimmering indie-pop. The album’s closer, Tired Ghost in Orbit, is a retooled version of an older song. It becomes an untethered nine-minute space jam, splicing indistinct radio conversations and retro-futuristic studio tinkering to flighty synths and drones. It floats freely, leaving behind such stifling notions as melody and yet always advancing on a simple framework of four chords.
Every Leaf Library release feels like an exploration of pop music’s possibilities, and each one seems to bring us closer to the realisation that those possibilities are endless. The archival nature of Library Music is the perfect way of experiencing the range of The Leaf Library’s work and the sonic versatility they command. We can only hope that Volume Two isn’t the final instalment.
Library Music: Volume Two (September 25, 2026) wiaiwya
The Leaf Library are:
Kate Gibson – vocals, piano, synth
Matt Ashton – electric and acoustic guitars, synth, percussion, programming, bass
Gareth Jones – bass, percussion
Lewis Young – drums, percussion, synth, programming
On Library Music: Volume Two, they are joined by:
Michael Cranny, Will Twynham, SJ Nelson, Jonathan Clayton, Alison Cotton, Daniel Ashton, Rob Smoughton, Hannah Reeves, Artie Ashton, Francesca Prattico and Freda D’Souza.