Tunng

The British ensemble Tunng fuses erratic psychedelic folk currents with more radical strains of electronic experimentation. Early in the 2000s the project coalesced around the composing alliance of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders, who gradually recruited additional musicians to expand their core unit. Reviewers struggled to categorize the resulting hybrid, sometimes calling it future folk and at other times folktronica, yet the group’s reliance on found-sound sampling was already evident across a series of singles that preceded the 2005 debut full-length This Is...Tunng: Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs. Over subsequent releases the musicians continued refining their digitally inflected folk palette while maintaining an active touring schedule that steadily broadened their audience. After issuing Good Arrows on Thrill Jockey in 2007, Genders withdrew to devote more time to family, although he rejoined for the 2018 album Songs You Make at Night and supplied material to the 2020 death-themed podcast The Dead Club along with its companion record; two decades after their first LP, the 2025 release Love You All Over Again deliberately revisited the electronically fused folk aesthetic of those initial recordings.

Genders and Lindsay had originally partnered while scoring music for softcore adult films, an unlikely origin that soon prompted them to assemble a band pairing Genders’ gentle vocal style with Lindsay’s guitar work and compositions. To enrich the textures they incorporated extra guitars, female voices, turntables, programming, and assorted percussion instruments. A handful of domestic singles appeared before the full-length debut This Is...Tunng: Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs surfaced in 2005 and received its American reissue the following year on Ace Fu. Their second album, Comments of the Inner Chorus, arrived in 2006. By then the project had evolved into a looser collective; because Genders had at first chosen not to perform live, the six-piece configuration—Genders and Lindsay together with vocalists Becky Jacobs and Ashley Bates plus multi-instrumentalists Martin Smith and Phil Winter—delivered Good Arrows the next year. Four years elapsed before the 2010 album And Then We Saw Land appeared, the first without co-founder Genders. Geographical separation and domestic priorities eventually drew the remaining members to Lindsay’s new base in Reykjavík, Iceland, where they began shaping the next record through extended jam sessions that later moved to Dorset, U.K., for a two-week recording period, yielding the fifth album Turbines in mid-2013.

Genders’ return and the restoration of the original lineup shaped the subsequent album Songs You Make at Night, which was assembled from scattered remote sessions and issued in summer 2018. The following year the band issued the rarities compilation Magpie Bites and Other Cuts, drawing together scarce tracks recorded between 2004 and 2018, chiefly material from deleted 7-inch singles plus non-album and previously unreleased cuts. An ultra-limited double-disc pressing contained eighteen selections, while the standard edition offered eleven. In September 2020 the group launched an eight-part podcast titled The Dead Club featuring conversations about mortality and interviews with philosophers, authors, and other artists whose work engages themes of death; the original Tunng pieces created for the series, all centered on dying and loss, were gathered into the seventh studio album Tunng Presents... Dead Club, released that November on Full Time Hobby. Five years passed before Love You All Over Again arrived in 2025, marking two decades since the debut and signaling a conscious return to the freaky folk and electronic interplay that had defined the project’s earliest phase.