In Winter, The Unthanks Find New Musical Landscapes

For the past year, Michael Depp has been working on a biography of the Unthanks and the wider moment in English folk music. Spending time with the band and their families, as well as undertaking dozens of interviews with colleagues, folk culture bearers and more, Michael sat with the band for the first play of their upcoming record, The Unthanks In Winter, in their Newcastle studio. 

In his first article for Tradfolk, Michael brings us the inside view on the album and the process of making it.

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On a late summer’s day in Newcastle, where slate grey skies and pelting rain are doing their best to provide a facsimile of winter, the Unthanks huddle over a studio mixing board, fussing over the final edits of their first-ever Christmas record, The Unthanks In Winter.

In Winter unfolds as a 75-minute opus, one that has travelled an atypical creative track for the band.

The song they’re working on, Dear Companions, is partly an original Unthanks composition. That’s a relatively rare creature for a band that has spent nearly 20 years reaching into a deep well of English folk music and beyond, weaving haunting, enveloping harmonies from the takings and transposing them onto sonic landscapes that seem planets away from the songs’ inception. It’s a process that has held them in good stead, launching them towards audiences well beyond folk’s fences and landing them into film and TV scores, a constant stream of commissioned work and growing plaudits with each successive project.

It’s also a process with which the band, comprised of vocalist sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank, pianist/arranger/manager Adrian McNally (Rachel’s ex-husband), fiddle player and vocalist Niopha Keegan and guitarist Chris Price, are very comfortable. Tackling originals, somewhat less so.

Which is why on this final day of mixing, McNally is still doing some heavy lifting on the track, destined to be In Winter’s first single. One of the choruses and other bits and bobs are excised: “All roads towards brevity are good,” he says.

“I’m inclined to agree,” nods Rachel. “It kind of cuts all the fuss out.”

The song was penned by younger sister Becky and her partner, Ainslie Henderson, during the staccato COVID quarantines (the tune draws from the hymn Come Thou Font of Every Blessing via Unthanks’ favourite Sufjan Stevens). It evokes a brief window of allowed gatherings in that dark period when the couple played host to the extended Unthanks clan, a family as close as they come, in their bucolic back garden outside a small Northumberland village. Dear Companions summons the sweet relief of reunion, warm with evening bonfires, kids toting handmade paper lanterns and family sing-alongs, bracing up against the chill of another impending lockdown.

But ebullience is not a pose the Unthanks strike naturally. “We know how to do dark songs. We know how to do gritty stories. To do something more positive and warm, we’re not quite as schooled at doing that,” Becky says.

Dear Companions was also composed as a parting song for the Unthanks’ signature singing weekends, a dozen-odd retreats they’ve held annually with their most ardent fans for nearly the band’s entire lifespan. To close the circle with the song’s incarnation on In Winter, McNally recorded its soaring choruses during several of those weekends.

As McNally plays back the edited track, Rachel’s eyes well up, prompting a sly smile from Becky. “It’s validating when you can make your sister cry,” she says.

While not overtly holiday-minded, Dear Companions lands right in place as In Winter’s closer, a synecdoche in song. Evocations of darkness and light, cold and warmth wend through each track and the connective interstitials between them. McNally underscores repeatedly that what they’ve crafted is “a winter fantasia,” not a Christmas album. As if the Unthanks would ever do anything as straight on as that. 

In Winter unfolds as a 75-minute opus, one that has travelled an atypical creative track for the band.

Normally, Unthanks projects are built by stitching pieces together over time. McNally tends to lay down the first musical frame, ideas coalesce among the core five members with a virtual mood board and then the most intense arrangement and compositional work follows under McNally’s lead with ideas continuously hashed between himself, Rachel and Becky. Keegan and Price eventually join the process and add layers. A record emerges. A tour follows.

That approach took the Unthanks down a creative cul-de-sac McNally wanted to escape. “Our records had started to sound more and more like the inside of my head and less and less like the band we could be if we maxed out the capabilities of the core five,” he laments.

There’s never been such an overtly jazz instrument in the band. It is a bit of a dangerous thing, bringing in a saxophone.

This time around, the Unthanks reversed the paradigm. Before it was a record, In Winter began in a touring incarnation last November across the UK and Ireland. Recording the album later followed in February, where the band sequestered in studios on the North York Moors, bunking in cottages and outbuildings while they laid down tracks in a converted barn.

Much of the arranging work happened on the fly in the compressed rehearsal period before the November tour. There, the core five shaped the touring version of the project in person, holed up in McNally’s house and joined by saxophonist Faye MacCalman, percussionist Will Hammond and bassist Dan Rogers. After the band had hit the road, fine tuning followed. “There were lots of daytime rehearsals in the first half of the tour,” Becky says. The resulting sound came together “as a bit more of a collective,” she adds.

The tracks themselves range widely in source material, some deeply rooted in Unthanks family tradition. Among them, Tar Barrel in Dale, a mainstay of the Unthanks’ singing weekends composed by their father, George, as an ode to the New Year’s Eve tradition of parading flaming tar barrels through the streets of Allendale in Northumberland. The song appeared in a previous version on the band’s Archive Treasures in 2015.

Also revived and reinvented from the Unthanks’ back catalogue is Greatham, which first appeared as The Greatham Calling On Song on Cruel Sister, the 2005 debut album from the band’s first incarnation as Rachel Unthank & the Winterset. Here, too, the song channels a family tradition for the sisters. In this case, it’s Boxing Day in the titular County Durham village, where attending the holiday longsword dancing and mummers play is an Unthanks calendar fixture.

The song is centred lyrically in the mummers players’ various self-introductions, and sung conventionally feels like “a lumpy, bumpy English tune,” McNally says. Instead, here the Unthanks summon the occasion through the sonic lens equivalent of frost-patched windows. An echoing sense of nostalgia pervades. “It’s more like a childhood memory of Greatham,” Rachel says of its gauzy quality.

Other tracks, like The Snow It Melts the Soonest, are drawn from the family’s holiday carolling repertoire (“In our family, it’s my song,” Rachel emphasises), while In the Bleak Midwinter seeks to replace and improve upon a version the band recorded for a BBC Four Christmas session over a decade ago that hasn’t sat well with them since.

Still other songs knit back to singing weekends, such as River, River and Nurse Emmanuel, a recasting of O Holy Night that pays homage to the selflessness of NHS workers with lyrics by poet Vanessa Lampert, herself a regular weekender. Meanwhile, more conventional tracks such as O Come All Ye Faithful, O Tannenbaum and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen are spun with the band’s signature gentle melancholy.

What may be most surprising to longtime Unthanks listeners more accustomed to wide, glacial soundscapes and droning strings are the album’s sudden eruptions of jazz, most dramatically underscored by MacCalman’s sax. MacCalman, who played with the band as a clarinettist on its 2017 album Diversions, Vol. 4, The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake, shows another musical side altogether here, leaning more into the jazz/electro/synthpop contours of Archipelago, the trio she leads. She fires the first warning shot with an early solo in Graeme Miles’ Dark December, a wintry musical sibling to the Unthanks’ earlier take on Miles’ Sad February from 2009’s Here’s the Tender Coming.

By Carol of the Beasts, MacCalman rapturously lifts into openly anarchic territory and the rest of the band follow, unbound. It’s a rare, exciting effusion for the Unthanks.

“There’s never been such an overtly jazz instrument in the band. It is a bit of a dangerous thing, bringing in a saxophone,” Becky winks.

McNally is pleased with the pivot. “I don’t think it sounds like a bunch of folkies trying to be jazzers,” he says. “That’s personal development for us as artists and for me particularly as an arranger and player to move into territory where I probably shouldn’t risk playing because I don’t have those chops.”

That latitude has pushed the Unthanks in a new musical direction, one less tethered to McNally’s original vision of the album and more rooted in the band members’ individual strengths. “In terms of how dreamlike and abstract this record might be, it’s nowhere near as abstract, and that’s good,” he says. “I came in wanting to make a very low-fi, atmospheric, dreamy kind of thing, but the quality of all the playing and the ideas is strong enough that you don’t want to murk it in a lot of Cocteau Twins-y wash.

“The atmosphere is in the content and the playing, rather than over-egging it,” he says.

That atmosphere is also enhanced by dustings of found sound McNally sprinkles through and between tracks: bracing winter wind; a door creaking open into a home’s warm embrace; the thrush of Christmas shoppers scurrying by; a Salvation Army band dimly blowing through a carol somewhere just out of sight, ahead on the pavement; the shake of jingle bells. Such moments twirl through In Winter kaleidoscopically.

Dear Companions’ last touches done, McNally kicks off his shoes, dims the studio lights and leans back into his chair at the mixing board. Rachel and Becky sink into the couch behind him, near perfectly centred between the studio’s two speakers. It’s time to give the record one last listen, all 75 minutes of it in one go.

This is the kind of milieu McNally would prefer for anyone listening to In Winter. It echoes back to marathon sessions of Genesis and King Crimson orchestrated across his childhood by his father, Max, a fervent musicophile who died earlier this year. Max would sit McNally and Price, his closest friend since toddlerhood, precisely between the family sitting room’s hi-fi speakers. No one would move or make a sound until the record had finished.

The trio honour In Winter’s maiden play – and perhaps also Max’s ghost – with the same silence and reverence. Rachel and Becky flash occasional, knowing smiles at each other. McNally, eyes closed, broods somewhere deep inside himself. His piano, Price’s guitar and Keegan’s fiddle string each track together like garland. Moods colour the room from the inky melancholy of a winter night to the fizzing lightness of a charger of Champagne.

The fantasia finally ribbons its way to Becky’s parting sentiment on Dear Companions. It’s a moment that weaves together the season’s deep palette of feeling – memory, longing, ephemerality, joy. Here, the Unthanks remind us, music is the vessel to carry it all.

“For this time we have together / Will live on in songs we sing,” Becky intones, offering comfort. It might be the Unthanks’ most essential gift against a hard winter ahead.

In Winter will be released on 29 November 2025 on double CD, vinyl and digital. The Unthanks will be touring the UK and Ireland in November and December.