Four months prior to the release of our debut album, sitting nervously in a London hotel and waiting to be called into Jools Holland’s studio, we began the tune which was to become the centrepiece of our new album. At around the same time we came up with the album title - ‘Collections’ - originally rather grandly intended as a concept album involving entirely home-made field recordings, but later, as the near-impossible practicalities of this became obvious, its significance and pertinence grew and we realised it was a word describing the way we view the world, the way we live our lives, and the way we work: many small ideas making up a greater whole. 

The two and a half years following have been a rough and tumble affair… Engagements, detachments, creative searching, yearning, despair and eventual discovery. 

We are the kind of band who never struggle for ideas, but have quality control mechanisms more intricate and complicated than algorithms can describe. We didn’t want to make an album that replicated ‘Acolyte’, that more-of-the-same-again approach seems all too abundant at the moment and it doesn’t interest us in the slightest, so we set out to challenge ourselves. In many ways this album has been a process of re-learning what we thought we knew. 

Things started to take shape in spring 2011, after a dark winter of discontent, dislocation and disconnection. By the following Christmas, we had enough material to get out of our studio and into a new space, with the right people to interpret and filter our ideas, and see them through to completion. 

January of 2012 and work began with Tim Goldsworthy, a pure sounds man with a taste that is second to none. In May, a relocation from Wales to Atlanta saw the finishing of the record with Ben Allen, a frenetic workaholic with quite a knack for MPC programming. Both sides couldn’t be more different, but we discovered (somewhat fortuitously as it was too late to start over…) they couldn’t be more perfect a marriage of styles that unified the disparate influences on the record. 

And that brings us just about up to date… The album is complete, tweaked, honed and slaved over for 3 years, but the outcome is something we’re proud of, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

‘Collections’ will be released on 28th January 2013. You can check out the track listing below and to kick things off you can watch our ‘Introducing Collections’ album trailer here. Full format details and pre-order links will be with you very soon.

See you around, 

Delphic.

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COLLECTIONS