Ben Howard has just released ‘Collections From The Whiteout’, the singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album. The 14-track LP includes the previously released singles ‘What A Day’, ‘Crowhurst’s Meme’, ‘Far Out’, and ‘Follies Fixture’, alongside a host of other new tracks that exhibit the continued growth of Howard as an artist.
With each album, the Brit Award-winner continues to distance himself from the conventional folk sound of his 2011 debut ‘Every Kingdom’, moving away from the acoustic arrangements and pastoral lyrical themes that helped to popularise him. Over the past ten years, the 33-year-old’s music has consistently displayed increasingly experimental musical arrangements and lyrical content, with ‘Collections From The Whiteout’ undoubtedly being Howard’s most fully realised example of this to date.
The most distinctive sonic aspect of the album is its incorporation of electronic musical elements. Tracks such as ‘Finder’s Keepers’, ‘Sage That She Was Burning’, and ‘Crowhurst’s Meme’ feature electronic drum patterns, synthesizers, and heavily distorted guitar riffs, which the singer-songwriter has never previously made extensive use of. These musically dense tracks are also complemented by instrumentally stripped-back tracks, such as ‘Rookery’ and ‘Buzzard’, where Howard allows his expressive songwriting to take centre-stage.
The musical experimentation and diversity we see on ‘Collection From The Whiteout’ perhaps owes to the collaborative nature of the project. Unlike his three previous albums, where the artist exclusively collaborated with the same small group of musicians, Howard opened the door to a brand-new range of collaborators for this new LP. Most notably, the Totnes-based singer-songwriter linked up with The National’s Aaron Dessner, who recently worked on Taylor Swift’s Grammy Award-winning and critically acclaimed indie folk album ‘Folklore’.
With nine production credits on the album, Howard has been very vocal about the impact that Dessner had on the creation of the album in the lead-up to its release. In a heartfelt message to Howard, Dessner himself took to Instagram today to speak about the process of making the album, saying, “What started as a relaxed experiment became one of my favorite creative processes and records I’ve ever been part of… I couldn’t be more proud of what we made.”
Thematically, ‘Collection From The Whiteout’ often alternates between historical anecdotes and personal snapshots. Whilst ‘Crowhurst’s Meme’ and ‘The Strange Last Flight of Richard Russell’ explore the tragic real-life stories of voyagers who ended up dead, ‘Finders Keepers’ describes the story of a friend of Howard’s father finding a dismembered corpse in a suitcase floating along the Thames.
Whilst discussing the often morbid themes of his new LP with the Independent, Howard explained, “We live in a macabre time. There’s so much doom and gloom happening constantly. It’s more the way we engage with it that I’m interested in.” Indeed, rather than simply being the archetypal gloomy singer-songwriter, Howard is often doing something far more subtle than many may give him credit for in his music. ‘Collection From The Whiteout’ perfectly exemplifies this, oscillating between minor and major tones, moving between feelings of sorrow and relief seamlessly.
‘Collections From The Whiteout’ is available to stream below:
