Hear London Folk Outfit Red River Dialect’s Frenzied, Fantastic New Track, ‘Gull Rock’

Red River Dialect are a London-based band with roots in Cornwall, England. Their new album, Broken Stay Open Sky, which is their fourth full-length, will be out 2/2 via North Carolina folk purveyors Paradise Of Bachelors. NPR debuted the lead single off the record, “Kukkuripa,” a couple weeks ago, and it’s a song that bleeds emotion but keeps things slower, never breaking into the radical, thundering realm of their second single, which we’re premiering today.

The second track off the new record is called “Gull Rock,” and it’s a nearly six-minute suite that alternates white noise with sweet, intricate harmonies, and an unrelenting pressure between the two. Songwriter David Morris credits his spiritual practice as the inspiration for these sweeping, massive songs that incorporate old world folk and the tension of noise and drone music with equal force.

With six members, it’s fairly easy for Red River Dialect to whip a song into a frenzy; Simon Drinkwater, Coral Rose, Ed Sanders, Robin Stratton and Morris had already played together for several years acoustically, and then they added drummer Kiran Bhatt in the summer of 2016. Working with this core group, and a friend, Jimmy Robertson, on the console, the band recorded Broken Stay Open Sky mostly in one room as a live band.

The resulting songs are steeped in the energy of a live performane, and also flecked with sound bleed and distortion, or what Morris calls “a bleeding that even Pro Tools cannot efface without taking the song away too.” Listen to the track above and look for their new album out early next month.

Broken Stay Open Sky will be out 2/2 via Paradise Of Bachelors. Get it here.

×