Tunng – Love You All Over Again review

There must, in 2025, be some kind of algorithmic supercomputer thing that knows the answer to this question: “If an artist says they’re going back to their roots, what are the odds of success?”. Ok, it’s a weird narrative to consider, but then again, it beats saying “Look, we’re out of fresh ideas, so it’s time to fish out those ancient demos and decide whether they were any good or not”.

Where Tunng are concerned the announcement that the sextet were in their own words coming “full circle” was met with some anticipation; their 2005 debut album Mother’s Daughter And Other Songs was an early benchmark in the never more awkwardly named ‘folktronica’ scene of the early 00’s.

For the uninitiated the mechanic was to blend organic traditional song structures with glitchy loops and DIY beats, the end result being much more aesthetically satisfying than that reads. Wise enough not to simply reboot the now familiar, the group’s main songwriters Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders have instead sweetened it, opener Everything Else a eulogy to our powers of regression.

Lindsay says that two decades on, being unorthodox is still what makes them tick. Here the Balearic glow of Drifting Memory Station surprises, whilst Yeekeys comes over as synth pop for Morris dancers. At the centre though is Snails, with it’s Roald Dahl-esque lyrics partially distilled from Lindsay’s marriage vows and a wistful symphony of acoustic guitars, banjos and woodwind. It’s one version of the past, but Love You All Over Again is much more than a blurred photo of a memory otherwise lost.

You can read a full review here.