Snow Ghosts Let Rip

Snow Ghosts have released the video for their single ‘Rip’, the first track to be taken from their new album, A Quiet Ritual, out May 3 via fabric’s Houndstooth label. Snow Ghosts’ Oliver Knowles also directed the video. Setting the tone for the rest of the album, the track’s unnerving and pulsating ambience permeate the track, with semi-spoken vocals and powerful instrumentation which build to an expressive climax of cathartic release.

The album centres around the theme of death and seeks to process the shock and grief of bereavement and its aftermath, as well as casting back across history and other cultures for their own metaphors and coping strategies.

The band explain, “A Quiet Ritual maps out stages of the grieving process and how every individual deals with it in their own unique way. Most importantly how they handle their own heart and the other fragile hearts inevitably scattered around them. The song ‘Rip’ is about the initial shock of grief, the effect it has on loved ones and the untimely destruction of dreams.”

Recorded in a castle in the countryside and two years in the making, A Quiet Ritual is written for an ensemble of classical and modern instruments including the carnyx, an Iron Age Celtic boar-headed horn excavated from a bog in Deskford, Scotland. For the carnyx, they enlisted the services of John Kenny, one of just a few musicians able to play the instrument and the first to do so in modern times.