Lankum - The Livelong Day (2019)

Our first impression of what to expect from Lankum’s third album The Livelong Day came in early September with the four-piece’s reinterpretation of hearty Irish classic, The Wild Rover. Over the five-minute course of the single’s video, Director Ellius Grace led us through a hallucinatory heathland, totally devoid of people. Deeply-inspired by folk horror, he later revealed: “I wanted to channel these very deliberate visions of the countryside as a place of both beauty and darkly storied unknown, steeped in our nation’s folklore”.

The result is an unnerving pastoral scene that strongly recalls the psilocybin-warped visuals of Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Cult hit Midsommar (which more or less swaps The Wicker Man’s Summerisle for the rural seclusion of Sweden’s Hårga) was scored by Bobby Krlic (aka the Haxan Cloak) and just as Krlic uses strings to push the soundtrack into more severe, exploratory extremes than most horror movies, Lankum are able to use acoustic drone to create a skin-crawling sense of foreboding unlike anyone else working in folk music. Compare the flatlining violin of Krlic’s Gassed with the chilling slide of The Wild Rover’s intro and you’ll recognise a lot of crossover in that mounting tension. Fans of the Dublin quartet will already know that they are no strangers to brooding soundscapes. However, the atmosphere on The Livelong Day eclipses everything, blacking out the sky like those bloated cumulus clouds captured by Grace. After you’ve been subjected to the weight of their ‘ancient drone’, the motorik pulse and ambient sinewaves of Harmonia, the outsider approach of Slint and the pummeling noise-rock of Swans all add up.