Johnny Flynn announces new album with Robert Macfarlane, shares lead track "Gods and Monsters"

"Gods and Monsters" is the first track to be shared from Flynn and Macfarlane's new album, and also marks Flynn's first outing of 2021.

The track is partly inspired by Victorian Assyriologist George Smith, who died in Aleppo in 1876 after being stranded in a cholera epidemic. The track is, according to a press release, about "false dreams and true love, about what it means to long for ‘the lights on the other side’, and how to tell a ‘story without ending’."

Lost In The Cedar Wood will follow Flynn's 2017 album Sillion, and was written with Macfarlane between March 2020 and February this year. The songs came together through sharing notebook pages, voice recordings and WhatsApp messages due to the lockdown. Eight of the tracks on the album were recorded at a cottage in a Hampshire forest.

The album is inspired, in part, by The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that's regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature and the second oldest religious text.

Flynn and Macfarlane's record was produced in lockdown by Charlie Andrew (alt-J, Marika Hackman), and will include contributions from Cosmo Sheldrake, Merlin Sheldrake and Flynn's nine-year-old son Gabriel.

Tracklist:

1. Ten Degrees of Strange
2. The World to Come
3. Gods and Monsters
4. Bonedigger
5. I Can’t Swim There
6. Nether
7. Flood in the Desert
8. Tree Rings
9. Enkidu Walked
10. Home and Dry
11. Ferryman