Keeley Forsyth announces her third studio album, The Hollow

"Horse" was inspired by the themes of domestic duty, poverty, love, and compassion depicted in Bela Tarr’s final film, The Turin Horse. She contacted its composer and Tarr’s long-time collaborator Mihály Vig to ask for permission to ‘reimagine’ his soundtrack score.

"With this track, I roamed, capturing vocals in different spaces, forging a connection as I sang. I imagined battling against an invisible force, facing down challenges, pressing on, determined to breathe in this," she explains. "I chose to refuse to be shackled by the chains of language here, surrendering instead to the primal dance of my body's urges. My mouth moves in sync with the shallow breaths of my gut, and impulse guiding my every wordless utterance."

The wilds of Keeley Forsyth’s adopted home in the North of England seem to inhabit her third record. The moors, on clear days, visible from her home studio window, impact upon a music that often feels made of these places. The title for the new collection derives from happening upon a long-abandoned mining shaft whilst out walking. At once alluring and hazardous, forced into a hillside, “there appeared a room and ever darkening hallway carved out of the ground. A place to be swallowed by, but also to emerge from”.

It’s this push and pull that is reflected in the tone, craft, and preoccupations of The Hollow. The past lurking within and haunting the present we now occupy. A connection to time that places us within it, facing what is gone and what may come.

Although having made music privately for most of her life it was only eventually in 2020 that she felt ready to find an audience with the release of her debut collection Debris. She has been awarded the PRS new music commission for her performance piece Bog Body and has scored Maxine Peake’s directorial debut short film, Incompatible. She has become a sought-after collaborator, currently working towards projects with the Iceland-based electronic music producer Ben Frost, and the Italian composer Teho Teardo.

Tracklist:

1. Answer
2. The Hollow
3. Come And See
4. Eve
5. Turning (feat. Colin Stetson)
6. A Shift
7. Slush
8. Drag Me Down
9. Do I Breathe
10. In The Corner
11. Horse
12. Creature (feat. Matthew Bourne)