Building on over a decade of activity, Ex-Easter Island Head have long been a cherished part of the UK underground. Functioning variously as a kind of deconstructed rock band, ambient chamber ensemble and minimalist compositional workshop, on 'Norther' we find the group combining their wide musical experience into something singular and coherent with a deeply emotional core.

Largely orbiting around their extended use of the electric guitar, their approach might at times recall the experiments of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, but across the album we see a band whose musical vision extends well beyond the iconoclasm of 80's New York. Drawing on hypnotic musics from across the spectrum, they bring a compositional approach to sounds often associated with freeform sprawl or more academic settings, never letting pathos be lost to process. Equally reminiscent of the gentle rolling momentum of The Necks as they are the coiled precision of an act on Kompakt; this is a music which ebbs and flows, lives and breathes.

Despite the long wait since their last full length, the band’s creative drive has been ceaseless in that time. Those eight years away were defined by collaborations, solo excursions and one-off performances – whether external projects like Dialect, The Aleph and Land Trance, their part in the Salford Large Ensemble of Northern underground musicians or Whistling Arrow, with Laura Cannell and Charles Hayward, a site-specific series of shows in Odense, Denmark, work with classical musicians like the BBC Philharmonic and Immix Ensemble, or ambitious educational projects with schoolchildren in Liverpool and Newcastle. “Nearly all of these have played into the direction the material on Norther has taken,” says the band’s Benjamin D. Duvall.