Hen Ogledd announce new album 'DISCOMBOBULATED' for February 20th

Today, Hen Ogledd - the collaborative project of artists Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington - announce DISCOMBOBULATED, their confounding and haunting new album set for release on February 20th via Weird World.

It's perhaps their most complex and emotionally charged record to date, involving meditations on political tumult, personal crisis and mental wellbeing in a world gone mad, yet also their most warmly inclusive and accessible.

“There’s something to Hen Ogledd that’s really not like a normal band,” says Richard Dawson. “It’s something… else.”

Hen Ogledd – named after the Welsh term for ‘The Old North’, the historical and political region encompassing what is now northern England and southern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages – coalesced slowly in the middle of the last decade. Davies and Dawson first began collaborating in 2013, but Hen Ogledd did not come fully into being until Pilkington and Bothwell were both involved ahead of 2018’s debut album proper, Mogic.

Third album DISCOMBOBULATED marks a considerable step forward in their evolution. The initial sessions for the record took place in early 2024, having been ‘rallied’, in Rhodri Davies’s words, by drummer Will Guthrie to get into a room together to develop the various ideas each member had. Living in different parts of the UK, Hen Ogledd often have to share sketches of music remotely before coming together to hammer them into shape; often, as on this record, with producer Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle.

Along the way, the record was opened up to an extensive cast of contributors. We hear the voices of friends’ and band members’ children, field-recorded horses and insects courtesy of Chris Watson and David Reid, and the supple drumming of Will Guthrie; there are spoken word contributions from the likes of Matana Roberts, Truly Kaput, C. Spencer Yeh and Circle’s Janne Westerlund (in Finnish naturally); saxophone from Fay MacCalman, trumpet from Nate Wooley and flute from Davies’ daughter Elliw.

“Maybe Hen Ogledd is more like a family than a band,” says Sally Pilkington. “There’s something really special about having kids’ voices in the music.

Yet it would be a mistake to characterise DISCOMBOBULATED as familial in the twee-est or safest senses of that word. A quiet radicalism and fury at injustice is woven into much of its lyrical and thematic content. On the first single to be shared “Scales will fall”, Dawn Bothwell’s urgent vocal leads the charge with her allusions to both protest history – the women at Greenham Common and Durham Miners’ Gala – and contemporary organising against corporate greed. Her vocal performances are among the record’s most striking, charismatic features. “Although I love hip hop, I want to make it clear that I’m drawing more on the spoken word tradition. I made up this term ‘Bard rap’; that’s more how I think of it.”

In the video for “Scales will fall” – directed by James Hankins - Bothwell is positioned as an “alternative populist leader,” she jokes, wearing a blue alien power-suit and provoking a gang of kids to rebel.

By turns emphatic and vulnerable, subtle and direct, joyous and furious, DISCOMBOBULATED is as strange, complex and moving a record as we have come to expect from Hen Ogledd. The cover art is a perfect complement: based on a painting by Dawson that was chopped into 32 pieces and sent to loved ones around the world as Christmas presents, it is named It’s Not Darkness That Falls, It’s Light, riffing on Thelonious Monk’s line “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light”. The title’s subtle shift in perspective, combined with the communal nature of the artwork itself, fits with the album’s themes beautifully.