The songs of Glasgow’s Constant Follower always engage deeply with the themes from which they sprout. Released in 2021, their debut Neither Is, Nor Ever Was saw lead Stephen McAll grapple with the consequences of a head injury which saw him lose almost all memory of his past, utilising poetry and art as a thread to follow when his own sense of identity had been obliterated. An album which “embrac[ed] this turmoil,” as we put it, “and in doing so offers a fundamental reimagining of memory, of the past and future, the real and not.” Follow-up Even Days Dissolve, last year’s collaborative album with Scott William Urquhart, again drew on literature as it turned its attention to our strange connection with the natural world. Closing track ‘Comes A Silence (Basking Shark)’ offered an encounter with the titular creature as a symbol of this relationship. “Here the basking shark is a kind of sublime experience,” we wrote in our review, “a visitation able to submerge us back into the ecosystems we have spent so long trying to escape.” As we continued:
It’s an apt encapsulation of the message at the heart of Even Days Dissolve. Let us head back into the environment around us, Scott William Urquhart and Constant Follower suggest. Stitch ourselves back into the fabric of the land. For the land is already within us and always has been. It just takes a moment to remember it, to understand.
Constant Follower have now returned with a new double single, Turn Around For Me / See You Soon, and the songs are no less evocative. Co-produced and mixed in Austin, Texas by Dan Duszynski (Loma, Brian Eno), ‘Turn Around For Me’ opens with the hushed grace so familiar to previous Constant Follower work. But as the track develops, McAll and co. breathe extra life into the arrangement and the song swells with an affirming rhythm which tips it towards indie rock territory. A spaciousness, perhaps, taken from the landscape in which it was recorded. “To stay out in the middle of nowhere in the Texas Hill Country for a month while we worked was quite the experience,” McAll explains:
I slept in an old RV nestled amongst pecan trees and would be woken in the night by the coyotes. I’d go for night walks to try and spot them, but all I’d see were the sparkling eyes of countless spiders watching me from the grass. We’d spend long days in the studio mixing what I’d recorded in Stirling, adding magical touches. This track won’t be on the album. I felt like it needed its own space, and a 7″ provides just that.
The track comes complete with a video by Tsumugi Yagi. “[The song’s] immediacy made me want to focus the video on a single character’s journey,” Yagi explains. “I filmed the character dancing in a simple setting, creating a visual that harmonizes with Constant Follower’s evocative music, which wraps around the heart of the listener. The video is intentionally not dark, yet it has a sense of enclosure, aiming to capture the nuanced emotions of the protagonist’s inner world.”
Turn Around For Me / See You Soon is out now via Golden Hum Recordings and available from the Constant Follower Bandcamp page.
Photo by Harri Reid, album artwork by Peter Russell