In early 2021 Lankum stood high above Dublin, facing the winds of Ireland's east coast overlooking the city in which they had made music together for over 10 years... and there was a feeling of disconnect. They had never seen it from this angle as they had always been firmly rooted within in it, perhaps even more as individuals than as a band. And so, at the aptly named Hellfire studios - starved of human contact and creating sound where for so long there had been silence - they began recording their fourth studio album False Lankum. Though sleeping each night in a Martello Tower next-door to Joyce's own, it was not the time for Lankum to look to history, nor to look down to Dublin and the present, but to look outward towards the sea - to look beyond themselves and that which was expected of them.
It was only after recording the band realised that almost every song on the album, collected or written, had some sort of reference to the sea. Some unknown force had drawn them to that, the greatest and most prolific song collector there has ever been, which has transported stories for hundreds of years and even carried the album's opener 'Go Dig My Grave' from Robert Johnson's 'A Forlorn Lover's Complaint', (c.1611), to Jean Ritchie's recording in 1963 and then to Ireland's own Lankum on its watery back. Their version of the song is both transcendent and an earthly beast lying in wait, and if this is an album of soaring highs and devastating musical lows, then with their first single, Lankum show us Hell before they show us Heaven.
If you have ever been to a Lankum gig, 'Go Dig My Grave' perfectly captures how it feels to hear them live. They play together as though they are a single lung, with sounds expanding and collapsing from indistinguishable mouths, bellies, fingers, keys and feet creating not so much a wall but an orb of sound. A starkly beautiful and haunting ball of energy. The unmistakable drone sound running through their work, as you'll hear on their most well-known tracks, 'The Wild Rover' (from The Livelong Day, 2019) and 'What Will We Do When We Have No Money' (Between the Earth and Sky, 2017) has the power to draw you away from the world as you give yourself up to its unique, cutting-edge soundscape.
