Love You All Over Again

Time flies when you’re being Tunng. Can it really be over two decades since the band’s genre-blurring, self-styled ‘pagan folktronica’ first emerged from an east London studio courtesy of a clutch of Gilles Peterson-endorsed singles on the small but perfectly formed Static Caravan imprint? It surely can, and what’s more, January 2025 will mark the twentieth anniversary of This is Tunng... Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, a debut long player whose acoustic guitars and poetic disquisitions on nature, mythology and the human condition, courtesy of Sam Genders, sieved through fellow band founder Mike Lindsay’s lattice of fractured beats and crackling electronics, still sounds like an impiously postmodern wedding of the rustic and the synthetic, the arcane and the futurist – one for which the designation ‘pagan folktronica’ is as good a shorthand as any. 

Whichever way we choose to describe it, that 20-year-old signature sound makes a warm return on Tunng’s eighth studio album, Love You All Over Again, a winning amalgam of texture and melody, disconcerting imagery and shapeshifting production, predicated, Lindsay reveals, on a conscious reacquainting with the band’s first principles.  “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle and the Wicker Man soundtrack, all of which I was discovering back then, together with Expanding Records [the Shoreditch-based repository of soi-disant ‘beautiful electronic music’], whose studio space we shared. That was all going into the early records. Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam and I made on that first album. Rather than searching for a new avenue we went back to what we used to do, which, after all this time, felt like it was a new avenue... Love You All Over Again is our way of coming full circle.” 

Love You All Over Again is, in many ways, a buoyant, celebratory rejoinder. A collection of spirited, mellifluous if ever-so-lightly eerie songs, it’s an album that, according to chief lyric writer Genders, reflects a sunnier latter-day disposition. “I’ve always been interested in the contrast between the pain and darkness of life on one hand and its magic and wonder on the other. These days, I guess I’m more drawn to the latter... Lyrically, it was very much stream of consciousness, and the songs have a lot of recurring themes: taking solace in nature, people, connections and the way life can be confusing and painful and so incredibly beautiful all at the same time.”  

Whether it’s that ineffable esprit de corps, the meticulous studio craft or simply a turn of the karmic wheel, Love You All Over Again, with its folk-hymnal intimacy, its glimmering lights and long shadows, its unforced fusion of soul and machine, feels like a Tunng album for today – something of a familiar comfort in uncertain times and, equally, a record for the ages. While, as Genders contents, this is not a pop album per se, it is, nonetheless, as melodically generous and lyrically bewitching as it is eccentric and startling, and in its highly detailed, genre-melding production, and in the preternaturally timeless, reverb-less blend of Genders’ and Jacobs’ voices (sporadically joined by Lindsay and the rest of the ensemble’s distinctive shanty choir), as captivating as anything in the band’s considerable canon. 

Released: January 2025
Cat: FTH542LP
Label: Full Time Hobby

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Tracklist 

1. Everything Else
2. Didn’t Know Why
3. Sixes
4. Snails
5. Laundry
6. Drifting Memory Station
7. Deep Underneath
8. Levitate a Little
9. Yeekeys
10. Coat Hangers