The records · 2023
Dig the Mountain!— the comeback album, 2023
- Released
- Autumn 2023
- Label
- Cooking Vinyl
- Tracks
- —
The record that was not supposed to exist
In March 2017 the band played what was announced, and widely reported, as their final show. Dig the Mountain! came out six years later and went higher in the charts than anything they had released before it, reaching the top ten of the UK album sales chart.
It is a less anxious record than the three that preceded it. The band that made Bonxie had a case to argue about not being twee; this one has stopped caring about the argument. What it has instead is space — for guests, for choral arrangement, for the environmental material that had been present since the beginning to be stated outright rather than folded into a metaphor.
How it started again
Not with a plan. Briggs, Ouin and Oli Steadman agreed to play Truck Festival in Oxfordshire and WOMAD Charlton Park in July 2022, five years after stopping, and the thing did not end there. Rob Steadman did not return to the drum stool; Felix Higginbottom has held it since.
At WOMAD, Oli took the other two to watch the Chinese musician Yijia Tu, whom he had played with in 2017. All three were moved enough by her singing to ask her to work on the album that did not yet exist. She ended up on the record and on the comeback tour.
The album was announced on 13 April 2023, on BBC Radio 6 Music, and arrived that autumn.
The collaborators
Alongside Yijia Tu, the autumn 2023 tour carried Fyfe Dangerfield and the folk singer Sam Lee. The video for “It’s Not Up To You”, in which Yijia stars, premiered on 28 July 2023 inside a live interview with Robert Macfarlane — a pairing that makes sense the moment you know that Macfarlane writes about landscape and language and that this band has been doing the same thing in three-minute form since 2006.
George Shilling mixed, as he had since 2011.
What followed
The year closed at the O2 Forum Kentish Town with the male voice choir Côr Meibion Gwalia, launching a Christmas single called “Excelsior” — a song about ash dieback, with a video assembled from fans filming themselves singing in front of ash trees around the country.
Then a UK tour in February 2024, their first full headline run in six years and selling out in advance in several cities; mainland Europe that April; and a summer of festivals including Greenbelt, Wychwood, Wood, Beautiful Days, Deer Shed, a headline set at Love Trails and a seventh Glastonbury. The band closed 2024 with a tour of churches, finishing at the Union Chapel in Islington, and released Best of Unplucked, acoustic arrangements drawn from the whole catalogue.
The next record is Beyonder.
FAQ
What is Dig the Mountain!?
Stornoway’s fourth studio album, released in the autumn of 2023 on Cooking Vinyl. It was the first record after the band’s reunion and their highest-charting release, going top ten on the UK album sales chart.
When did Stornoway get back together?
July 2022, with sets at Truck Festival in Oxfordshire and WOMAD Charlton Park. The album was announced the following April on BBC Radio 6 Music.
Who plays on it besides the band?
The Chinese musician Yijia Tu, whom the band heard at WOMAD in 2022 and invited to collaborate, appears on the record and toured with them. Fyfe Dangerfield and Sam Lee were among the other guests on the comeback tour.
What were the singles?
“Trouble With The Green”, “Bag in the Wind” and “It’s Not Up To You”, whose video premiered on 28 July 2023 during a live interview with the writer Robert Macfarlane.
What is Excelsior?
A Christmas single released at the end of 2023 with the male voice choir Côr Meibion Gwalia, launched at the O2 Forum Kentish Town. The song is explicitly about ash dieback, and its video is made of fan contributions filmed in front of ash trees around the UK.