The Unthanks In Winter

When December draws near, The Unthanks will release and tour their new doable album 'In Winter' - a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons.

Moving in and out of focus - like a memory - a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience. Echoes of winter tunes known throughout the western world, mix with the traditional and the newly written, all passed with great care and love through The Unthanks filter.

'In Winter' is an abstract new work that captures the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill and darkness of the winter months, and the reflective ritualisms of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like! A Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits. A newly written tribute to the NHS. An abstract take on 'A Ceremony of Carols' by Benjamin Britten. Traditional wassails and old stories coloured with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi's 'Merry Christmas Charlie Brown'.

"There are few times when you discover a band and they stalk immediately to the heart of everything you love and hold dear." - Maxine Peake

"They run from the very root of folk music to the very tip of the branch." - Elvis Costello

"It's quite a rare thing now. They've really got everything you could want from music. And I'm very fussy." - Robert Wyatt

"Few of their contemporaries, within both folk music and the wider artistic spectrum, have such a keenly-honed ability to locate in a song the emotional essence that can, in just a single phrase or vocal elision, cut one to the quick." - The Independent

"The Unthanks have covered a lot of ground in the past decade and watching them evolve over this period has been truly inspiring." - Phillip Selway (Radiohead)

"It hits you in your soul rather than your head. I love them." - Adrian Edmondson

"If there was such a thing still as having a favourite band like in the old days, I'd say they were my favourite band." - Paul Morley