Multimedia collective This Is The Deep sign to 5dB Records and announce the new album, Everything, alongside the release of their new single ‘Darkness and the Dawn’.
There’s a sense, with This Is The Deep, that music alone is never quite enough. Their work expands outward into painted sets, animation, and theatrical storytelling, forming a cohesive visual and sonic world that feels closer to an evolving piece of theatre than a conventional band project. That world now opens further with Everything, due September 9th.
The first glimpse arrives with ‘Darkness and the Dawn’, a track that operates as both introduction and threshold. It is built from elegant avant-pop instincts, moving between chamber-pop intimacy and orchestral expansiveness, where piano and strings drift in loosely sketched patterns before gradually coalescing into something more structured and luminous. A distant rhythmic pulse emerges, carrying a reflective vocal that holds the track in a space between melancholy and uplift.
Formed by visual artist and musician Ranald Macdonald, the collective spans the UK, Brazil, and Japan, and approaches genre as a palette rather than a boundary. Elements of alt-rock, orchestral folk, chamber-pop, and psychedelic garage-rock are all present, but none remain fixed for long. Instead, the music moves in surges and dissolves, balancing intimacy with bursts of theatrical colour.
The group’s songwriting language draws on the melodic clarity of Burt Bacharach and Carole King while leaning into more surreal and experimental territory associated with David Lynch and the emotive abstraction of Aldous Harding. The result is a form of avant-pop that feels both carefully composed and deliberately unsettled.
Across Everything, the band build a concept narrative following Richard (Dick) Herman, an employee at the fictional social media corporation Telepix, who falls asleep at his desk and wakes on a perfect beach. From there, the story descends track by track into the ocean, where memory fragments, realisations, and monsters emerge from the depths. The album becomes a psychological journey as much as a musical one, with each song functioning as a stage in that underwater progression.
Self-produced with additional work from SHOLTO and Patrick Fitzroy, the record draws on a wide set of influences, including the lush density of the The Beach Boys Smile sessions, the orchestral drama of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, and the layered indie construction of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. These references surface not as imitation but as structural echoes within a densely arranged sonic environment.
On ‘Darkness and the Dawn’, that approach is immediately evident. The track begins in fragments, with strings and piano unfolding like half-remembered motifs before brass and percussion gradually enter, expanding the sonic field. What starts as introspective drift eventually opens into a radiant, theatrical chorus, where the arrangement shifts from introspection to something closer to release.
The band describe the track as a call to reconnect with nature, and it is here they explain its narrative foundation in full:
“The Song is a call to be held by and reconnect with Mother Nature. It comes from a place of feeling lost and stuck between two places, a past darkness and the dawning of a new day.
It opens our upcoming concept album which tells the story of Dick Herman, an employee of fictional social media corporation ‘Telepix’, who after dozing off at his desk job, wakes up on a ‘perfect beach’ where the spirit of nature appears to him, depicted in our video as a woman with the face of a golden sun, and prompts him to wade into the water, where with each track we plunge deeper into the sea, where memories, monsters, and realisations lurk.”
The ensemble behind This Is The Deep reflects the project’s expansive ethos, drawing from jazz, classical, folk, and experimental scenes across the UK. Contributors include Mashu Harada and Angus Macdonald (Aristugi), harpist Rachel Kitchlew (Alexis Taylor, Matthew Halsall), violinist Clementine Brown (Penguin Cafe), and a rhythm section featuring João Gratzi and Rudy Mellen, alongside trumpet player Alex Sharples. Vocal and familial ties also run through the group, with Alice Macdonald and Hector Macdonald among the collaborators, reinforcing the sense of a collective built on long-standing creative and personal connections.
If Everything lives up to its opening statement, it is less a conventional album than a constructed world, one designed to be entered rather than simply heard, where each track deepens the descent into its submerged narrative landscape.
Listen below:
