Description
Gilles Peterson-championed cinematic maestro SHOLTO returns with his third album in three years. Following the epic, sprawling odyssey of 2024's double album 'Letting Go of Forever', his new project 'The Sirens' builds upon the groove-rooted, string-soaked dreamscapes and ethereal textures upon which he's built his name, this time inverting the beauty into a haunting fever dream. Deeply cinematic at its core, the albums' tender jazz harmonisations flow into a moving undercurrent of strings and harp, anchored by SHOLTO's rhythmic sensibility and dramatic vocal cues that drift in and out across the record's 12-tracks, capturing the essence of Sirens like dream sequences caught mid-thought. The record is emotionally unflinching, exploring themes of duality, temptation, and emotional dislocation, in SHOLTO's words "blurring grief with groove, seduction and surrender".
Using the world of myth and the carnivalesque as a vehicle for exploring the intricacies of the human condition, 'The Sirens' emerged from a space of uncertainty and spiritual fatigue for SHOLTO. Drawing from ancient allegory to navigate his inner turbulence, the album is grounded in quiet defiance and tension that sometimes never quite resolves. Created once again in the fertile, creative hub of SHOLTO's SFJ studio in Hackney, the album reunites a familiar cast of musical characters, giving voice to the community feel and cohesive sound world he's building. The core of the SHOLTO sound is here, with Syd Kemp returning on bass, Clementine Brown on strings and Rachel Horton Kitchlew on harp.
