Norther

In meteorology, the word Norther refers to a cold wind that blows down from the North. For Ex-Easter Island Head, it’s also an apt title for the strange and multi-faceted sound of their new album, their first since 2016, which drifts from billowing clouds of melancholy to propulsive hypnotic headwinds.

Years in the making and crafted in their home studio housed within the former Brazilian consulate in Liverpool, the music is an ever shifting thrum of sounds, both acoustic and electronic, which appears to teem and squirm, yet which moves as part of one mighty breeze.

Building on over a decade of activity, Ex-Easter Island Head have long been a cherished part of the UK underground. Functioning variously as a kind of deconstructed rock band, ambient chamber ensemble and minimalist compositional workshop, on 'Norther' we find the group combining their wide musical experience into something singular and coherent with a deeply emotional core.

Largely orbiting around their extended use of the electric guitar, their approach might at times recall the experiments of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, but across the album we see a band whose musical vision extends well beyond the iconoclasm of 80's New York. Drawing on hypnotic musics from across the spectrum, they bring a compositional approach to sounds often associated with freeform sprawl or more academic settings, never letting pathos be lost to process. Equally reminiscent of the gentle rolling momentum of The Necks as they are the coiled precision of an act on Kompakt; this is a music which ebbs and flows, lives and breathes.

The record consists of six pieces, each of which demonstrates an entirely different creative process. On blossoming opener ‘Weather’, whirring motors are made to dance fairy-like atop guitar strings and drums before being overwhelmed by great thrusts of bass; on the dizzying ‘Magnetic Language’ the band’s voices are played back through their phones and amplified with guitar pickups, magnets wrapped in copper wire, a conversation between technology old and new. The title of penultimate piece ‘Golden Bridges’ refers to the brass rods the band shift beneath the strings of their guitars to create its glowing cascade of harmonics.

All, however, tap to one degree or another into that abiding theme of the weather, not least the title track for which the band erected a ramshackle aeolian harp –an instrument played by the wind – on the roof of a former meteorological observatory on The Wirral. With it they captured an actual norther, bottling its elemental power for their own devices. When examining their specimen they found a deep resonance between the sounds it made, which are eerily akin to guitar feedback, and the quest to extract rich overtones from the instrument that has remained a constant through their career as experimental outliers.

Despite the long wait since their last full length, the band’s creative drive has been ceaseless in that time. Those eight years away were defined by collaborations, solo excursions and one-off performances – whether external projects like Dialect, The Aleph and Land Trance, their part in the Salford Large Ensemble of Northern underground musicians or Whistling Arrow, with Laura Cannell and Charles Hayward, a site-specific series of shows in Odense, Denmark, work with classical musicians like the BBC Philharmonic and Immix Ensemble, or ambitious educational projects with schoolchildren in Liverpool and Newcastle. “Nearly all of these have played into the direction the material on Norther has taken,” says the band’s Benjamin D. Duvall.

“All of the projects we were involved in between 2016 and 2024 have expanded the boundaries of what we do by exposing us to a huge variety of instruments, personalities and ways of working. It's really allowed us to see the purity of making music with a four-piece group.”

That status as a quartet is a new one, with longstanding friend and collaborator Andrew PM Hunt (Dialect) now a permanent fixture. Having a member of the band handling recording and mixing has helped the band push further into their own language, moving beyond simple documentation, as on previous albums, into a lush, technicolor vision all of their own.