Hen Ogledd - Scales will fall

Q4 W47 New Music 2025

Hen Ogledd – Scales will fall

Hen Ogledd announce “DISCOMBOBULATED”, their third album and first new music in six years, arriving February 20th via Domino Recording Co.
The collaborative project brings together Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson, and Sally Pilkington for what might be their most complex and emotionally charged record yet.

Named after the Welsh term for “The Old North”, the historical region encompassing northern England and southern Scotland, Hen Ogledd has always been something unusual. “There’s something to Hen Ogledd that’s really not like a normal band,” Dawson says. “It’s something… else.” Living in different parts of the UK, they share musical sketches remotely before convening to hammer them into shape, working with producer Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle.

The initial sessions took place in early 2024, led by drummer Will Guthrie, and the album featured an extensive cast of contributors. The record features field recordings of horses and insects by Chris Watson and David Reid, voices of friends’ and band members’ children, spoken word from Matana Roberts, Truly Kaput, C. Spencer Yeh, and Circle’s Janne Westerlund (in Finnish), plus 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,” Pilkington observes. But this familial spirit comes with quiet radicalism and fury at injustice. First single “Scales will fall” features Bothwell’s urgent vocal leading the charge, alluding to protest history from the women at Greenham Common to the Durham Miners’ Gala and contemporary organizing against corporate greed. Bothwell calls her approach “Bard rap”, drawing on spoken word tradition rather than hip hop. The track crunches between folk, post-punk, and post-rock before dissolving into a horn-laden stomp.

The video, directed by James Hankins, positions Bothwell as an “alternative populist leader” in a blue alien power suit, prompting a gang of kids to rebel. The album cover comes from a Dawson painting chopped into 32 pieces and sent to loved ones as Christmas presents, titled “It’s Not Darkness That Falls, It’s Light”, riffing on Thelonious Monk’s line.