Quade detail remarkable new album 'The Foel Tower' on AD 93
Quade
Announce new album ‘The Foel Tower’
Out 18th April via AD 93
Watch video for lead single ‘Beckett’
For their Sophomore album, The Foel Tower, Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley.
The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddlearound crackling fires each evening. “There was very much a feeling of being on the complete
fringes of society,” It was an environment that would go on to play a hugely significant role in shaping the band – a Bristol four piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths and Tom Connolly– and the record they have made. It’s an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent – gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills – to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as “doomer sad boy, ambient-dub, folk, experimental post-rock”. ”It wasn’t just the dramatic landscapes and the isolation of their rural recording retreat thatwould inform the sound of their record but also the essence of togetherness that being in that
situation brought out. “We’ve individually experienced a lot of difficulty over the last several years and Quade has represented a space to shelter from these,” the band says.“This means we often communicate extensively with each other about the issues affecting us individually and collectively. These conversations and concerns are central to The Foel Tower.”
Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. Which it can then send as far as 70 miles to Birmingham. However, in the late 1800s this land was occupied by local farmers and families in the hundreds until the British Government acquired the land, cleared the valleys, and
promptly displaced them in order to begin serving the vastly expanding industrial English city.The band dug into the history and politics of this and wove it into the themes they were already
thinking about, using what the Foel Tower stands for as something of a contemporary metaphor.“This tension was something that we wanted to explore without the haughty judgement of our more metropolitan lifestyles,” they say.
Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy, there is a pleasing dualityto the final sound of the record. One that feels fragile and intimate but also powerful and
forceful, as introspective as it is expansive, and a record that is as detailed and textured as it iswide open and spacious. It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences – from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats – but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered.
“The album very much feels tied to this valley for us and the conversations and experiences we shared there,” they say. “It brings up a great deal of poignancy for us, an emblem of some fleeting respite from the strains we all have to experience. But there’s also deep sadness knowing how transient these moments are – in fact, there’s just a great deal of sadness in this album. But it’s also a record that while personal, resigned, and emotionally burdened, is ultimately hopeful.”
Watch video for lead single 'Beckett' Stream/Pre-Order - https://ad93.lnk.to/TheFoelTower
Quade Tour Dates
5 April 2025 – Bristol, UK – Strange Brew (Accidental Meetings: Saccade)
24 April 2025 – Oxford, UK – The Bullingdon
27 April 2025 – Southampton, UK – Heartbreakers
15 May 2025 – Manchester, UK – The White Hotel
16 May 2025 – Glasgow, UK – The Glad Café
Tracklist 1. Beckett 2. See Unit 3. Bylaw 7.1 4. Nannerth Ganol 5. Canada Geese 6. Black Kites
