Pictish Trail reveals new music video accompanying his latest single ‘It Came Back’ from new album Island Family out in March and coinciding with his upcoming UK tour.
Also announced today, Pictish Trail will be curating a brand new edition of Howlin’ Fling! that will celebrate the album’s release with a very special homecoming gig on the Isle Of Eigg. Island Family Gathering will be taking place over the weekend of July 1st and 2nd, with very limited tickets going on sale on March 5th.
Directed by Sam Wisternoff (SJ Esau), ‘It Came Back’ is a glitchy, imploding pop video that dives into the hilarious and infuriating world of video communication. It also features a special guest appearance from esteemed UK comedian James Acaster.
The understated verses of ‘It Came Back’, with their tense, foreboding bass-driven electro hip-hop accompaniment, bursts to life with an arms-aloft falsetto chorus, and a brain-shattering industrial metal meltdown.
Produced by long-term collaborator Rob Jones (The Voluntary Butler Scheme, The Gene Dudley Group), Island Family is strange, unpredictable and sardonic. A deeply personal record, it’s inspired by all from Fever Ray to The Flaming Lips, Liars, Mercury Rev and Beck, Island Family is Pictish Trail’s contrarian view of arcadia; a search for the euphoric in the bucolic, bound up in sometimes conflicting ideas and feelings around nature and environment, sincerity and artifice, escapism and belonging. It’s an album about how no man can remain an island, however hard he might try.
Pictish Trail’s critically acclaimed albums Secret Soundz Vols. 1 & 2 released 2008 and 2013 respectively were gloriously eclectic slices of lo-fi folk-pop, revived as a deluxe double vinyl in 2014 by Moshi Moshi. Third album Future Echoes was released to further acclaim in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award by popular vote, before being re-issued by Fire Records in 2018. Thumb World was released on Fire in 2020. Pictish Trail has toured the world with Belle & Sebastian, Sea Power, Slow Club and KT Tunstall. He has performed at festivals including Glastonbury, Field Day, Bestival, Deer Shed, Celtic Connections, the Edinburgh Fringe and – for an extraordinary and surely record-breaking 19 consecutive years* (*counting a remote livestreamed show in 2020) – Green Man in Wales, Pictish Trail’s psychedelic-bucolic spiritual home-from-home.
Pictish Trail’s Island Family is out 18th March on Fire Records.
Pictish Trail’s ‘Island Family’ is out 18th March on Fire Records. Available on Limited Edition Green Vinyl, Black LP, CD & Digital.
