The Pop Corporation

We’ve heard people raving about Lankum, and like all nosey parkers, we wanted to know what was going on to see if we would find a new band we liked, and at worst, not like them and generally be dismissive of other people’s music tastes and bemoan the state of it all. Good news! This is a great new band who will have a new LP out soon!

Irish band Lankum are about to be four LPs in, which means there’s going to be people wondering what took us all so long, but we’ll ignore that because no-one can possibly keep up with absolutely everything absolutely all the time. They’ve been referred to as ‘gothic’ and such, and the music is very, very heavy. You’ll feel a bit beaten up after a listen, in the best possible way – hard on the soul, not on the ears.

That said, it’s still life affirming stuff – this isn’t exercises in naval gazing and pointless brow beating. It’s tuff, emotional, spiritual music. Not for the weak of heart.

A lot of these new folk/folk adjacent bands fall foul of insipid sweetness or, worse still, forced rousing middle class sailor bollocks – but Lankum seem to have much better record collections, instead instilling the weirdness of stone circles with freak folk LPs from the ’70s. It’s soft in places sure, but the gentleness is cut with the strangeness of local traditions, and then comes the doom-laden drones to make you feel like you’re getting sacrificed to some false god.

That’s the stuff isn’t it?

And when we say drone, it’s a mixture of the folk-drone of trad. arr. music, but also the spectacular headfuck of say, Sunn O))). Sometimes you end up with a similar sense of disorientation that you get when you listen to ‘Sister Ray’ too loud. They can lull you in and be foreboding at the same time – the music has been described as having a ‘deathly intent’, and that’s a great thing to say about a band, especially a psychedelic folk group.

Importantly, the draw from more than one pocket of folk – there’s Irish (obvs – they’re an Irish band), Scottish and English death ballads in the mix, but also, German Kosmiche, dark ambient, shoegaze and even a smidge of death metal. It’s brilliant. They’re brilliant. They’re a breath of fresh air in a scene that, honestly, can suffer from too much reverence of history, and worse still, cloying tweeness.

One writer said they were ‘fierce and fragile’, and that’s exactly what they are. Any upcoming gigs and all set to blow your brains clean out of your head, so start looking now, because the imminent LP ‘False Lankum’ is going to be massive.