Pictish Trail: “Thumb World” – Fire Records 21 February 2020

Fire Records announce brand new material from Johnny Lynch, AKA Isle-of-Eigg dwelling electro-acoustic psych-pop wonder Pictish Trail. Kaleidoscopically out-of-this-world ode to heavenly surrender ‘Slow Memories’ accompanied by a stunning animated video by renowned Scottish designer Swatpaz (Davey Ferguson) – is the first track to be previewed from Johnny’s fourth album Thumb World, which is due for release on Fire Records on February 21, 2020. Four years in the making, Thumb World is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Scottish Album of the Year Award public vote winner Future Echoes. Pictish Trail is on tour throughout November supporting Steve Mason.

 

 Bold, weird, wild, wired, sonically luxurious yet never losing touch with its DIY-‘til-I-die roots, Thumb World is a voyage to the outer rings of Pictish Trail’s mind at its darkest, funniest and most inventive – a plugged-in, fuzzed-out, fucked-up contemplation on, as he puts it, “life repeating and gradually degrading, the inevitable cyclical nature of things, and the sense of there ultimately being no escape.” Expect alien abductions, thumping beats, Trump-haired pigs, paternal panic, astronaut sex, bad acid trips, worse hangovers, lashings of distortion and a lot of anthropomorphic thumbs. “Our opposable thumbs are the things that separate us from most other animals on Earth,” Pictish explains, of the fat digit symbolism, “they are also the things that we use to swipe on screens, to separate ourselves from our normal lives, but which in turn trap us within an artificial reality.”

Produced and mixed by Rob Jones, featuring string arrangements from Kim Moore and drumming from Alex Thomas (Squarepusher, Anna Calvi, Air), Thumb World is Pictish Trail’s most collaborative album to date. An audio-visual dialogue with Swatpaz, AKA Scottish artist Davey Ferguson – the man behind the Turbo Fantasy series and an entire episode of cult TV phenomenon Adventure Time – furnished Johnny with not just a graphic aesthetic for the album, but even helped him to shape the   sound of the finished record. “I sent Davey a work-in-progress mix of the album,” Johnny says, “he came back with sketches in which he had reimagined Thumb World as an 80’s arcade game. Some of the songs are centered around specific visual images, inspired by Davey’s sketches.”

When not putting out his own music as Pictish Trail, Johnny is a fulcrum of the British independent music community. Through his label Lost Map Records, he champions a diverse and idiosyncratic array of extraordinary talent and has helped to elevate the likes of Rozi Plain, Seamus Fogarty, Bas Jan, Callum Easter and Free Love to name just a few to new heights. Lost Map’s Howlin’ Fling Festival which he curates roughly every other year on the isle of Eigg, has welcomed special guests from Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle to James Holden, Beth Orton, Alexis Taylor, Jon Hopkins, Jane Weaver, Jens Lekman, Cate Le Bon, Gruff Rhys and Gwenno. It’s a life-affirming experience that sees all the exceptional music, creative energy and tireless good vibes that Johnny helps put out into the world all come piling back to his for a party like no other.

Photo credit: Stephanie Gibson Styling: I’ll Be Your Mirror

Pictish Trail’s critically acclaimed first pair of albums Secret Soundz Vols. 1 & 2 released in 2008 and 2013 respectively were gloriously eclectic slices of lo-fi folk-pop, later revived as a deluxe double-vinyl in 2014 by Moshi Moshi. His third album Future Echoes was released to further acclaim in September 2016, and went on to be shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award by popular vote, before being re-issued by Fire Records in the summer of 2018. Pictish Trail has toured the world both as a headliner and as support for artists including Belle & Sebastian, British Sea Power, Slow Club and KT Tunstall. He has performed at festivals including Glastonbury, Field Day, Bestival, Deer Shed, Celtic Connections, the Edinburgh Fringe and – for an extraordinary and surely record- breaking 17 consecutive years and counting (or for as long as they’ll continue to have him, anyway) – Green Man, Pictish Trail’s psychedelic-bucolic spiritual home-from-home.