the unthanks

Sisters, Rachel and Becky Unthank, had been researching and idly harmonising to songs for a winter album that has been on the Unthank to-do list for 15 years.

Recorded in one wintry week on the North York Moors, The Unthanks' 'In Winter' is an extensive, completist time-capsule of the season. Features Christmas tunes known throughout the western world, mixed with the traditional and the newly written, all passed with great care and love through The Unthanks filter. The band’s sixteenth album creates a world in itself, capturing the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill of the winter months, and the reflective ritualisms of the turn of the year.

In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like (O Tannenbaum); a Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits (Carol Of The Birds); a French carol given desert blues menace, a newly written tribute to the NHS to the tune of O Holy Night (Nurse Emmanuel); an opening piece inspired by A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten (In Winter’s Night); traditional wassails and old stories coloured with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi’s Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.