Hen Ogledd don’t sound interested in tidying themselves up for polite company. ‘Discombobulated’ is messy on purpose: a record that treats 2026 less as backdrop and more as battleground, stitching together protest, pastoral myth and free-form freak-outs into something defiantly un-housetrained.
On Scales Will Fall Dawn Bothwell delivers rat-a-tat spoken word moulded into something she’s dubbed “bard rap”, railing against hierarchies of greed while hymning grassroots resistance. The hook, when it lands, reaches for the euphoric, a singalong smuggled inside agitation.
Folk music is often most successful when the ancient tunes are re-envisioned in a new way, but that itself is an orthodoxy to which Hen Ogledd might be constitutionally opposed.
Dead In A Post-Truth World skins this a different way. Richard Dawson’s grave, measured vocal skewers the jingoistic nostalgia of Operation Raise the Colours’: “The mythical country you claim allegiance of is gone / it was never here.” Musically, its surprisingly placid, folktronica textures soften the lyrical bite. The calmness of the album really helps here.
Then there’s End Of The Rhythm, a whirling jig that argues for collectivism not just in words but in sound. Guitars, brass, voices and children’s contributions pile in, ragged but rich. It’s chaotic, yes, but there’s joy in that chaos. The real leap is Clear Pools, a near-20-minute sprawl of exploding drums, skronking sax and howled invocations. Like ‘Discombobulated’ as a whole, which at times feels like four brilliant ideas happening at once, it teeters on self-indulgence, occasionally losing its centre, but it’s hard not to admire its sheer nerve.
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