Hen Ogledd – "Discombobulated"
Between the Cracks of This World
Hen Ogledd are back, and they sound as though they've found a door between the cracks of our wounded present—behind it, sounds shimmer in iridescent colours whilst all the world's rage lurks in the shadows. Their new album "Discombobulated" is released today. With this record, the Newcastle upon Tyne band invites you to pause for a moment and linger in the acoustic undergrowth.
What you'll hear is the flicker of political fractures, the quiet creak of personal exhaustion, the distant hum of a society that's long since lost its rhythm. And yet this music feels welcoming and open. Not despite its darkness, but because it doesn't deny the darkness. It's precisely there, in the deepest shadows and abysses, that it searches for light—and finds it.
"Discombobulated" is about collapse and resistance. About a world coming apart at the seams and the question of how we carry on regardless. The songs tell stories of borderlands, both geographical and metaphorical. Of mining landscapes caving in on themselves. Of dances that become uprisings. Of old fairy tales mixing with political fury. It's an album about the end of something and the dogged attempt to build something new from the rubble. Nothing about it sounds smooth or easy. The music telling these stories is anything but polished. It stumbles, breaks, flickers—and never stops searching.
Sally Pilkington, Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, and Richard Dawson have delivered their third album with "Discombobulated". The four chose their band name from Welsh. It means something like "The Old North". This refers to the historical and political region that encompassed what is now northern England and southern Scotland during the Early Middle Ages. It's about borders, about history, about what remains when landscapes fragment and maps are redrawn.
A Collection of Musically Woven Rituals and Rifts
There's a heated debate at the moment, and many agree that "Discombobulated" is Hen Ogledd's most complex and emotionally charged album to date. Across its eight songs, the band addresses the great ruptures of our time: politics derailing, personal exhaustion, and the question of how we're supposed to stay sane in a world that feels like a carousel without an emergency brake. Even though it kicks off with their signature intensity, the record has become their most accessible yet. It's warm-hearted and invites you to discover Hen Ogledd's world. Richard Dawson says about his band:
"There's something to Hen Ogledd that's really not like a normal band. It's something… else."
This "else" is palpable in every single track on "Discombobulated". Because Hen Ogledd aren't a conventional band. Their interplay resembles a ritual. What you hear is a mystical gathering. A chorus of voices, both strange and familiar, finding each other and drifting apart, only to return in reprises. Sally Pilkington explains:
"Maybe Hen Ogledd is more like a family than a band. There's something really special about having kids' voices in the music."
The children's voices, Sally describes, appear suddenly, as if someone had briefly switched off gravity. Chris Watson and David Reid have contributed field recordings that feel like radio signals from a parallel universe. Horses, insects, wind, the creak of branches in the breeze—and what else is there in the background? It feels so familiar to me. Then there are spoken word contributions from Matana Roberts, Truly Kaput, C. Spencer Yeh, and Circle's Janne Westerlund (in Finnish, naturally). Will Guthrie on drums. Saxophone from Fay MacCalman, trumpet from Nate Wooley, flute from Rhodri Davies' daughter, Elliw.
Quite an extended cast, isn't it? Yet nothing on this album ever feels forced. Everything is organic, interwoven, and part of a greater whole. A natural structure.
Eight Songs Capturing Our Flickering Age
"Discombobulated" is a fable about falling and rising again, at times satirical and marked by audible protest. The voices gather, scatter, and return to share their experiences. They tell of human-drawn borders ("lunatic seriousness"), dance through catastrophes, whisper visions from the realm of hungry ghosts.
"Nell's prologue" opens the album with a child by the campfire. The fairy tale pages are rain-soaked, the letters blurring. Language itself seems to slip away at this point. It's blurred, smudged, reaching through only as a kind of memory. But from this tangle of half-forgotten stories, a voice emerges. Smooth as mercury, it calls out to Tír na nÓg, the Celtic land of eternal youth. A beginning that isn't a beginning, but an immersion.
"Scales will fall" stomps through the Cheviot Hills like a furious protest march of witches, vagrants, and children. The song rails between torn flags dancing in the wind on ancient stone towers. Against the greed of the powerful and all those who profit from filth. Dawn Bothwell's urgent vocals lead the uprising, her allusions to the women of Greenham Common and the Durham Miners' Gala unmistakable. She says:
"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."
The piece is a borderland ballad, half anti-capitalism carnival, half rebellious pageantry. James Hankins directed a video for it, featuring Dawn Bothwell in a blue alien power suit. As an "alternative populist leader", as she laughingly puts it, a figurehead provoking a gang of children to revolt.
Hen Ogledd – "Scales will fall"
"Dead in a post-truth world" is a corkscrew-like, unpop ballad. It spirals relentlessly into a pomp-pop meltdown. An "ordinary dad" stares furiously at the newspaper, baffled by our appetite for snake oil salesmen in suits. Weird? It gets even more intense. Brains splatter on the dancefloor whilst hollow slogans ring out and the destroyed popstar at the podium sings us ever closer to fascism. At this point, the satire curdles into pure, bitter frustration: "hornswaggled by our own bad choices".
"Clara" flickers like a film reel gone off-track. A pastoral idyll haunted by spoil heaps and smouldering coal seams. A horse trots through Clara Vale, but the ground collapses beneath its hooves, gives way, and finally breaks apart. Beneath the murky water, the coal still glows. The mining landscape transforms into a living, tangled place that is simultaneously beast and bog. A disco ball spins overhead like a warning light. Festive cheer and catastrophe lie close together.
"End of the rhythm" erupts into ecstatic dancing mania. People throw themselves headlong into the sunset, beside themselves and untameable. They've come to reclaim what's old. Signs from the past meet torn flags. The borders must be torn down! Dawn Bothwell shares the song's unshakeable message:
"They want us to fail, but workers can win."
Hen Ogledd – "End of the rhythm"
The third video from James Hankins for "Discombobulated" explodes into a colourful, psychedelic 3D world. Visibly inspired by early 90s rave visuals, it combines the driving rhythm with shimmering, distinctive imagery. Hankins says:
"For this third and final Discombobulated video, I wanted to blast off into space… sort of. Inspired by early 90's rave visuals and similar computer animations from that time, we started creating a bunch of different gaudy, vibrant visuals that we would then take into our 3D world and apply to the objects we built."
"Amser a ddengys" is Welsh and means something like "time will tell". The piece sinks deep like a trembling meditation. An old man speaks. He tells of his fear and, in the same breath, the relief at still being here. Of years gone by and the luck of having survived.
"Clear pools" drags you through dark waters, over sharp rocks, and through chaos that takes your breath away. Then, suddenly, there's crystal-clear stillness. People stand knee-deep in luminous water, disturbed and bewildered. Something like hope flickers in their eyes. The song tells of a cycle of collapse and resurfacing, silence after the storm.
"Land of the dead" closes the album with heavy, grey weight. The inspiration comes from Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books: A wanderer wanders through a labyrinth of marsh and fog. The path seems endless. Then a flute melody lures him straight into a shaft deeper than anything past. A fall without bottom.
Light That Falls instead of Darkness
Because "Discombobulated" by Hen Ogledd is a total work of art, the album cover naturally fits perfectly. It's titled "It's Not Darkness That Falls, It's Light" (referencing the Thelonious Monk quote "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light") and is based on a painting by Richard Dawson that was cut into 32 pieces and sent as Christmas presents to loved ones around the world.
This shift in perspective fits the album's themes perfectly. It's not about denying the darkness. It's about recognising that light only exists because we need it. And that we carry it together.
A Live Music Ritual
On 6th June (my birthday, what a coincidence!) Hen Ogledd want to perform an eight-hour sound ritual at London's Horse Hospital under the title "Discomboduration". Their plan:
"We want to break our album ‘Discombobulated' through prisms of drone, improvisation, dance, screaming, kinetic sculpture, confusion, and dreamlike dream-pop. With costumes and a life-size pop-up book set by artist Rachael MacArthur, a psychogenic fantasy landscape will emerge that changes with each phase of the performance."
Together, Hen Ogledd explore what it means to perform through crises. To dance, to speak, amidst the ruins. For their shared vision, they're building a temporary space and inviting others to participate.
Here's Why You Should Listen to "Discombobulated"
"Discombobulated" refuses to accept the world as confused, exhausted, and unjust as it is. Hen Ogledd would much rather open a window and let in some light. Not because the darkness completely disappears. But because we can only face it together. The band doesn't counter chaos with a closed counter-programme, but with an open, sparkling promise: that new spaces can emerge amidst the cracks.
"Discombobulated" was released today, 20th February 2026, on Domino Recording's sub-label, Weird World.
