Skylarks by HARESS

Third album from acclaimed Shropshire collective and the much-anticipated follow-up to 2022's Ghosts. Dark, traditional and magically cosmic sounds from deep within Rural Britain.

"Far above the skylark sings
And beats the air with joyful wings
Till all the sky with music rings
At high noon of the day"

With 2022's critically acclaimed album "Ghosts", enigmatic Shropshire group HARESS marked out their own place in a growing landscape of artists navigating the worlds of the traditional and the rural in new ways.

"Ghosts" led to the normally reclusive Haress venturing out from their base in the Shropshire Hills for live performances with the likes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Shovel Dance Collective, Big Brave, Steve Von Till and appearances at Supersonic and Krankenhaus Festivals - not to mention making fans of everyone from Kevin Martin to James Holden in the process.

"Skylarks" is perhaps the natural conclusion of these past few years for the group. Whereas previous Haress recordings have embraced something of the unknown in the process of their making, "Skylarks" sees a well-travelled group of musicians carefully craft expansive and expressive pieces of music in a powerful and instinctual way. The music here might be long but it never sprawls out of control. The telepathy present in live performance has been harnessed and used to carefully compose and arrange these four pieces, narrating a journey through landscape and time that is as powerful as it is beautiful.

Inspired by found folk songs, the power of nature and the power of community, and Ben Myers' brutal tale of resistance The Gallows Pole, Haress have created a genuinely epic soundtrack to a world both past and future, real and imagined. The ambience and atmosphere of the recording (expertly captured by Phil Booth of JT Soar Studio on location in the group's hometown of Bishop's Castle) is entirely natural, the sound of an ensemble playing live in the room around you. The only vocal interjection this time comes from a choir of voices, replicating the communal singing that has been the centrepiece of Haress live performances. When the voices emerge it feels truly euphoric and heavy. Not heavy as in metal, but heavy as in the Earth itself - a primal, joyful gut punch to the system.

"This blissed-out psychedelia is not quite pastoral – there’s nothing twee about these unwinding grooves – yet evokes water and wood, light and shadow, a place of forgotten labour and the absent human form with a beguiling grace" - Luke Turner on Ghosts, The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2022

"That timelessness of the old sounds but with an added tripped out modernity and dissonance hooked into the past by the power of drone is magical and exhilarating stuff – they are truly spellbinding – ancient and modern like British ragas or a damp searching for the soul of England take on the desert blues of a Tinariwen" - Jon Robb reviews Krankenhaus Festival 2023, Louder Than War