Admiral Fallow

As a Glasgow band prone to self-deprecation, Admiral Fallow will probably wince at the plaudits their extraordinary third album, Tiny Rewards, has received.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, sonically audacious and lyrically bewitching are words that spring to mind. The quintet, however, would more likely describe Tiny Rewards as a dozen songs from an 18-month experiment to do something different.

“When you’ve played your own songs hundreds of times, you can start to mock some of their features,” says drummer Phil Hague, apparently unaware of how few bands possess the self-awareness to do anything of the sort. 'There were certain aspects of our sound that, two albums in, we decided we should maybe steer clear of – acoustic guitars being the most obvious.'

Which is how the band once categorised as indie-folk (or nu-folk or folk-rock) began on the path to Tiny Rewards, an album created largely on keyboards, on which acoustic instruments remain but are often unrecognisable, on which space matters as much as sound and with textures as rich as the melodies are moving.

Key to that shift in sound was starting the album instrumentally as a five-piece, rather than coming together to work on songs already roughly written by front man and lyricist Louis Abbott.