GROWN UNGROWN

Having not seen each other for years, Eleanor Rudge and Oliver Catt reconnected in a cottage at the foot of Black Hill, on the Scottish border, where Orpine was born and where they wrote their debut collection. Delicately branching and bereft of irony and cynicism, the songs have room to inflate and deflate, to meander, and shake loose like an antidote to sagging spirits. Harmonies wash against gentle strums and climb from the ambient to the anthemic as Orpine turn their backs on modern absurdity with nerve and solemnity. Like a tiny figure on the horizon casting a huge shadow on the mountain, there is a humbleness that projects awe without hubris. With the majority recorded at The Crow’s Nest in Hackney, strings and brass were added at Greenman Swaler – a secret place Oliver helped some friends build when he was a teenager. Leaving the studio environment for the den-like locale befits an album with a narrative that is generously autobiographical. The record’s title is taken from the Walt Whitman poem ‘On The Beach At Night Alone’, which is characterised by the theme of duality; knowing and not knowing, understanding and not understanding.