The Unthanks - In Winter (2024) [Official Digital Download]

Recorded in one wintry week on the North York Moors, The Unthanks In Winter is an extensive, completist time-capsule of the season, featuring Christmas tunes known throughout the western world, mixed with the traditional and the newly written, all passed with great care and love through The Unthanks filter. With most pieces drifting into the next, In Winter is a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons. Moving in and out of focus, like a memory, its a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience.

Released on gatefold double vinyl and double CD, its the band’s sixteenth album but a world in itself, capturing the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill and darkness of the winter months, and the reflective ritualisms of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life.

In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like (O Tannenbaum); a Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits (Carol Of The Birds); a French carol given desert blues menace, a newly written tribute to the NHS to the tune of O Holy Night (Nurse Emmanuel); an opening piece inspired by A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten (In Winter’s Night); traditional wassails and old stories coloured with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi’s Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.

TRACKLIST

01. The Unthanks - In Winter's Night
02. The Unthanks - O Tannenbaum
03. The Unthanks - Dark December
04. The Unthanks - Gower Wassail
05. The Unthanks - The Holly and the Ivy
06. The Unthanks - O Come All Ye Faithful
07. The Unthanks - Carol of the Birds
08. The Unthanks - Carol of the Beasts
09. The Unthanks - The Cherry Tree Carol
10. The Unthanks - Bleary Winter
11. The Unthanks - In the Bleak Midwinter
12. The Unthanks - The Snow It Melts the Soonest
13. The Unthanks - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
14. The Unthanks - Coventry Carol
15. The Unthanks - River River
16. The Unthanks - Nurse Emmanuel
17. The Unthanks - Tar Barrel in Dale
18. The Unthanks - Greatham
19. The Unthanks - Dear Companions



Thanks to the Original customer.