There's something alchemical about Bishopskin when they release new music, a mix of folk mysticism, emotional heft, and old-timey gravity that sounds ancient yet startlingly new. Their latest single, "Doggerland," is no exception.
Recorded in Hastings with James McMillan, whose work has featured icons like Van Morrison, Amy Winehouse, and Sade, and mixed by Jockstrap's Jake Cartwright, "Doggerland" comes to us as a spectral preoccupation on memory, myth, and the land that once connected Britain with continental Europe before it was submerged beneath the waves. There's a tidal gravity in the song that drags you under. The instrumentation seems well-outfitted but storm-battered, immediately evoking images of eroding coastlines and vanished histories. Vocals hover like an ambient rite, between lament and invocation, as if they were calling to ancestors across water.
In an age of immediacy, when many modern tracks aim to construct a mood with haste and no waste, Bishopskin embraces the space between atmosphere and linear storytelling. This compelling blend will resonate well beyond the track's final chord. "Doggerland" doesn't feel like a song, so much as a landscape, a dreamscape, an ancient relic that has been half-buried and is now stirring in the moment.
For lovers of music that leaves the physical for the spiritual, "Doggerland" is a surreal passage through rarely glimpsed territory. In "Doggerland," Bishopskin not only tells a story but also excavates it, drawing the reader to the eerie beauty of a world submerged by changing tides, yet never fully extinguished beneath their feet.
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