Chimehours are the UK-based duo of Beck Goldsmith and Jon Dix, and we are honoured to premiere their new video and single ‘Underneath the Earth’, the title track for their debut album slated for release on 24 October 2025.
There is a delicious haunting air to the track, a pastoral elegance enhanced by the sounds of nature as the track fades. There are clearly folk tinges with crystalline dreamy vocals that recall Kate Bush in the light as feather delivery but touched with a certain gothic-laced glimmer.
With the ghosts of ‘The Wicker Man’ in mind (the original film of course, not the later abomination), the band says they wish to create a new musical project in which they could express their shared love for folk horror, ghost stories and supernatural:
We wanted to do something that musically spoke to those influences and allowed us to explore the themes they raise – nature, folklore, time, community, and a sense of the uncanny.
The dappling instrumentation and the faint drone in the ether capture this sense of existential mystery and enigma, lending a visceral pagan air.
The track is accompanied by a luscious film directed by John Bradburn and featuring a boy George Bradburn (his son?) and a ghostly spirit (Colin Murtagh) which perfectly captures the ethereal beauty and haunting nature of the track as the boy explores the mysterious woods, experiences pain and anxiety before a joyous rescue and a mysterious apparent disappearance, a key the only remnant:
The video is as cinematic and expressive as the track: an element of pagan rituals, dance and the often terrible wonders of nature, innocence versus experience and the thrilling nature of music.
The single is out on Friday and comes off the duo’s forthcoming album ‘Underneath the Earth’, out through Cold Spring Records. The album concept took shape after a candlelit reading of Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ one Burns Night. Dix explains:
The themes and setting cemented our ideas and gave us a specific focus, and we imagined ourselves writing a soundtrack to the book, or to an imagined film of the book. From there, the songs came together at their own pace and distance.
Inspired by ethereal minimalism, retro cinema and folk narratives, Chimehours craft a sonic palette reflecting on the pressures of modern life and the desire for reconnection with the natural world. Goldsmith says:
With ‘Underneath the Earth’, we wanted to capture this complicated relationship with nature and the sense of something calling to us from somewhere else – an ‘otherness’ that exists just outside of what we know and understand. Something old and eternal and familial, and at the same time unsettling.
Written and produced between Derbyshire, London and Margate during lockdown and beyond, the album incorporates drones, drums, gritty guitars merging with woodwind, strings and voice textures that resist clear linearity. The duo says:
We started to get bigger and bolder in our approach, and it was fun and mysterious and compulsive to bring it all together (as though other forces were at work…)
Feature Photograph: Tim Topple
