Beyonder [CD]

Fresh from selling out London's Royal Albert Hall, Stornoway return with Beyonder - their most ambitious album to date. Out 25 September via Cooking Vinyl, the record expands the band's sound while holding onto the melodic warmth and sense of wonder that has long defined their music.The album began in one of the most remote corners of the UK. While volunteering as a National Trust ranger on St Kilda, 100 kilometres west of the Outer Hebrides, frontman Brian Briggs spent weeks living among the island's towering sea cliffs, seabird colonies and abandoned settlements. The experience - standing on the edge of the Atlantic with nothing between the island and Canada - sparked the first songs that would become Beyonder. A photograph taken there now forms the album cover."Never have I been anywhere so wild and exposed, and never have I felt more alive," Briggs says of the experience. The stark landscape and the island's layered history - where centuries-old blackhouses stand not far from a modern military base - shaped a record that quietly reflects on connection, fragility and the changing world around us.Beyonder is an album for a changing world. It confronts the biodiversity and climate crises, the rise of divisive politics, and the toll these pressures take on our minds and communities. These are songs about journeys and destinations, discovery and choice, and taken together they cultivate a hopeful state of mind in unsettled times. Musically, Beyonder sees Stornoway stepping beyond the folk label often attached to their early work. The songs feel broader in scale, with expansive arrangements that still centre on the band's distinctive harmonies and clear melodic writing. The album was mixed by multi-Grammy-winning engineer Oli Jacobs (Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, The 1975).