Today is the day!
William Doyle’s new album Your Wilderness Revisited is out now. You can pick it up from all good record shops (such as Rough Trade, Piccadilly Records and Norman Records). It’s also up on Bandcamp!
Reviews for it are already coming in. DIY mag writes:
‘Your Wilderness Revisited’ might be [Doyle’s] most accessible record to date. The worlds William conjures, of broken fences, stretched out washing lines and lustreless blocks of flats, is one that’s all around us. On ‘Design Guide’, in his beautifully crystalline vocals, he sings, “I stood still in the cool of the evening / Watched the sun as it skimmed the horizon / Every house silhouetted in unison,” evoking that suburban feeling of removal from the bustling city but also the discovery of your own kind of beauty.
And whilst there may be references to wider academic concepts about space and architecture across the record, it’s there for us to stumble upon if we want to, not forced into the listener’s face. William wants us to find our own experiences in amongst his. Because these songs are personal, but also open to us…
How refreshing to encounter, in the age of algorithmically engineered instant Spotified gratification and an unstemmable torrent of albums that barely demand a single play, a proper old-fashioned grower, intriguing enough to stick with after the first spin, and increasingly rewarding with each subsequent one. The fact that William Doyle’s first commercially available album under his own name (and his third including those as East India Youth) is only a shade over half an hour certainly helps its moreishness, but even more so is the abiding spirit of upbeat stoicism, the knottily nuanced symphonic arrangement and the knack for nagging melody that peppers the entire record.
It’s amazing to see this out in the world, after almost five years spent talking about and exploring England’s strange suburbs with Will and video whizz Sapphire Goss. I get a bit emotional listening to it now, after spending a whole summer a few years back driving around the suburbs of Hull to Will’s first string of demoes. It’s been amazing to hear it grow.
It’s an amazing album — and perfect for the car, which is always a bonus for me personally — and it has been an honour to work on the visuals with Will over the last few years.
You’ll find my photographs on the front and back covers (of both the main and indie-exclusive versions) and in the vinyl gatefold, and I hope you find they encapsulate the album as well as we think they do.
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