The Declining Winter - Last April (2024)

Making music is a time-consuming process. The whole business of creating a record – from the initial fluttering of inspiration to the moment the first paying listener hits play – is often measured in years, so it must, on occasion, spark a strange temporal disconnect between listener and artist. In the wake of The Declining Winter’s last album (Really Early, Really Late, 2023), Richard Adams suffered a profound personal loss. His bereavement – at the time a personal thing, its details unknown to most of his fans – would presumably have had some effect on his live performances, on the way he thought about and promoted his new record, and on his whole creative process.

Eighteen months on: another Declining Winter record. This time, Adams’ loss is laid bare; all the emotions that were raw and new for him at the start of this particular cycle are now presented to the listener, still raw, still new, but somehow changed. Because if making music is time-consuming, time itself also has the power to consume. It can take emotion and change it, subtly or violently; it can take an artistic gesture and alter its meaning in any manner of ways. If time is ultimately destructive, it can also offer hope.

Last April contains six songs that, as a whole artistic statement, represent two apparently opposed things: the condensed moment of grief, and an abiding and growing hope. In musical terms, it is very different from last year’s album. Gone are the textural, multi-layered, studio-perfected songs that welded pastoral songcraft onto a rich backdrop of ambient, post-rock, shoegaze and neo-classical. Instead, Adams has stripped all of that away and we get the voice, the acoustic guitar, and a smattering of Sarah Kemp’s violin. The most unambiguous expression of grief here is Mother’s Son – a cover of the Purple Mountains’ song I Loved Being My Mother’s Son – where Kemp’s notes sail sadly over the drastically slowed-down, reimagined melody. It is a thoroughly melancholy reverie.

Adams, who learnt his trade as a founder-member of beloved indie post-rockers Hood, never makes the mistake of trying to get out of a song too quickly – he is an expert when it comes to creating the right mood and letting it last for just the right amount of time. Eyes on Mine, the opening track, seemingly unfolds at the exact pace of a memory; the result is an eerie, haunted tableau vivant whose figures shift slightly when you’re not looking. The title track doubles down on this mood, with a simple acoustic guitar refrain and Adams’ breathy vocals inhabiting the air like a mist. An unnerving but often quite beautiful presence inhabits these songs, and seven or eight minutes can go by like a time slip.

Unsurprisingly, memories are a recurring theme, but Adams’ singing and the liminal nature of his music imbues them with an ambiguous universality. Lime Tree House pairs specificity of detail with broad emotional sweep, thanks to the soft-focus production and yearning vocal refrain. My Greatest Friend progresses on fluid guitar lines, a lesson in quiet surprise, while August Blue builds and unveils painful truths with stately timing. Kemp’s strings emerge like sunrays out of a cloud as the song moves from a shuffle to a swell away from uncanny atmospherics and into heartfelt emotion. It’s the perfect example of the combination of sadness, hope and love that music can capture perhaps more effectively than any other artform. It’s a combination that Last April is absolutely steeped in.