The Stornoway albums in order, and the studio discography around them

The shape of the Stornoway albums discography

Release dates, labels, producers and chart positions below are those the labels published and the charts recorded. Where two sources give different dates for the same record, the month is stated and the day is left out.

This is the Stornoway discography in full. The five Stornoway albums in order span sixteen years, with a six-year hole in the middle where the band had stopped. The first three came at a steady clip on two labels, the fourth arrived after a reunion nobody had been promised, and the fifth is dated September 2026.

They are not five versions of the same record. The debut is four people in a room with more instruments than people. Tales from Terra Firma is the one with the budget and the arrangements. Bonxie is the one with a producer of Gil Norton’s weight and actual birdsong pressed into the tracks. Dig the Mountain! is the sound of a band that had stopped needing to prove anything. What Beyonder is, we will know shortly.

Before the studio albums

Nothing here counts as one of the Stornoway albums proper, but the three EPs below are where the discography actually starts, and two of them were recorded before the band had a label at all.

Three EPs came first, all self-released. The Early Adventures of Stornoway was the demo collection that BBC Oxford Introducing played in March 2006 — the one that got a presenter suspended for barricading himself in the studio and playing an hour of it. Letters From Lewis followed in 2007 and On The Rocks in 2008, by which time the band were headlining the first Wood Festival.

By the time 4AD signed them — in the castle grounds at Lews, in Stornoway itself, after finally visiting the town they had named themselves after — they had been going for four years and had already been on Later… with Jools Holland, the first unsigned band ever to manage it.

Between the studio albums, in order

Reading the Stornoway albums in order leaves gaps of two and three years, and the releases that fill them are the part of the Stornoway discography most listings drop.

The gaps are not empty. iTunes Festival: London 2010 and the 4AD Session EP came out either side of the first album. In November 2013 the band put out You Don’t Know Anything, a mini-album of outtakes from the Terra Firma sessions, ahead of a tour that closed at the Barbican. In 2024 they released Best of Unplucked, acoustic arrangements spanning the whole catalogue, at the end of a tour of churches that finished at the Union Chapel in Islington.

The most recent record

Five studio albums. The fifth, Beyonder, carries a release date of 25 September 2026.

Beyonder is released on 25 September 2026 on Cooking Vinyl. The band announced it in March, on the day they sold out the Royal Albert Hall, and have put out three songs from it since: “Marco Polo”, “Fire and Water” and “The Book of Time”. Tour dates follow in October and February.