Album of the Week: Tunng

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Album of the Week: Tunng

Songs You Make At Night Out Now via Full Time Hobby

Aug 24, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Blood Orange

Tunng released a new album, Songs You Make At Night, today via Full Time Hobby. It’s the first album with the original lineup (including founding members Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay) since 2007’s Good Arrows. While we are not doing a full-on Album of the Week post on it, we wanted to acknowledge it as this week’s Album of the Week.

Songs You Make At Night is their first album in five years and the first album since 2007’s Good Arrows to feature the full original lineup (including Ashley Bates, Phil Winter, Becky Jacobs, and Martin Smith), after Genders took a decade long break from the band. “We really wanted to do a Tunng record going back to the original line up,” Lindsay says in a press release. “There was a real magic in the early records that we all wanted to capture again in this one.”

Genders says in the press release that he purposefully looked back to Tunng’s earlier albums when prepping for Songs You Make At Night. “I got very much into the idea of a dark underwater world suffused with pockets of light and beauty and some of the songs grew out of that. That interplay of darkness and light is certainly a theme of the early records. I actually spent quite a bit of time listening to the first three albums in the car, to get back into that headspace before writing.”

Winter was also instrumental in crafting the album’s sonic palette, using his sampling skills to work in samples from South Korean pop records, Planet of the Apes clips, and a speech from the 1970s British pornographic actress Mary Millington. It all blends with Bates’ nylon string guitar parts, Jacobs’ vocals, and Smith’s percussion for a complex yet somehow effortless sounding release that might be Tunng’s most electronic album to date.

Previously Songs You Make At Night single “ABOP” was one of our Songs of the Week. “Dark Heart” was also one of our Songs of the Week.

Lindsay has also teamed with Laura Marling for the duo LUMP, who released their excellent self-titled debut back in June via Dead Oceans.

Read our The End interview with Tunng’s Sam Genders about endings and death.

Read our review of Songs You Make At Night.