Hannah Peel

Hannah Peel launched her individual recording career in 2011 with The Broken Wave while already performing as part of the folk-pop trio Magnetic North. The album presented her soft, flowing vocal style and a distinctive mix of classic folk traditions with pop songcraft and electronic textures. For her third studio album, 2017’s Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, she assembled an array of analog synthesizers alongside a 29-piece brass band. In addition to her work as a recording artist, she has composed for cinema and television, creating the music-box motif heard in the 2012 film Anna Karenina and contributing original scores to the series Kiss Me First in 2018 and The Deceived in 2020.

Born in Northern Ireland, Hannah Mary Peel began performing as a fiddler in her father’s band. At eighteen she enrolled at Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, where she furthered her abilities on violin, trombone, and piano. After providing session support for Sandi Thom, she joined the touring and recording lineups of David Ford of Easyworld, the Unthanks, Blue Roses, and Duke Special; she also directed the thirteen-piece ensemble Kinetic Fallacy for a headline appearance at the Big Chill Festival. Encouraged by BBC Radio 6 Music presenters Marc Riley and Stuart Maconie, she issued the 1980s-covers EP Rebox and prepared material for her first full-length record. Produced by Tunng’s Mike Lindsay with string arrangements by Nitin Sawhney, The Broken Wave appeared on Static Caravan Records in 2011.

The album’s favorable reception prompted Simon Tong and Erland Cooper of Magnetic North to ask Peel to join them on their 2012 project Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North; she supplied vocals, played several instruments, and wrote the string and brass parts. That same year the feature film Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley, incorporated a music box that Peel had designed and recorded. Erland Cooper later co-produced her 2013 EP Nailhouse, which she tracked at her private studio stocked with vintage analog synthesizers and which merged acoustic and electronic sounds. The 2014 Fabricstate EP followed, containing the Royal Television Society award-winning track “Chloe” that was placed in the British series Dates.

Issued on her own My Own Pleasure label, Peel’s second album, 2016’s Awake But Always Dreaming, reflected her grandmother’s experience with dementia. During the same period she partnered with Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve on two BBC Radio 6-playlisted singles and completed another Magnetic North record, Prospect of Skelmersdale. As the first woman to receive the Momentum Music Fund grant from the Arts Council of England, she began developing a new project centered on the immensity of space. The resulting Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia, built from analog synthesizers and soaring brass arrangements performed by a 29-piece colliery band, was released in mid-2017.

In 2018 Peel shared composition duties with Matthew Simpson on the six-part series Kiss Me First, and her music-box interpretation of “Tainted Love” appeared in an episode of American Horror Story. Her score for the documentary Game of Thrones: The Last Watch earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary Series or Special (Original Dramatic Score) in 2019. That year she also issued the collaborative album Chalk Hill Blue with poet Will Burns. Further screen work arrived in 2020 with the documentary Lee Miller: A Life on the Frontline and the four-part thriller The Deceived, while Paul Weller’s album On Sunset incorporated string arrangements written by Peel.