Beyonder began on the highest sea cliffs in Britain. On St Kilda, 100 km west of the Outer Hebrides, Briggs stood 430 metres above the Atlantic with no land between him and Canada. Surrounded by wheeling fulmars and dive-bombing skuas, he explains that he was “in their world, I couldn’t survive here for long.” A photograph he took that day now forms the album cover and marked the start of a creative rebirth.
“Never have I been anywhere so wild and exposed, and never have I felt more alive,” Briggs says. Volunteering as a National Trust ranger by day and writing by night, Briggs absorbed the island’s stark contradictions with abandoned “blackhouses” built by a community that lived sustainably for 4,000 years set alongside a modern military base watching the same horizon. That tension, between nature and geopolitics, fragility and resilience, runs through Beyonder.
Beyonder is an album for a changing world. It confronts the biodiversity and climate crises, the rise of divisive politics, and the toll these pressures take on our minds and communities. These are songs about journeys and destinations, discovery and choice, and taken together they cultivate a hopeful state of mind in unsettled times.
“Lying in bed in a stone blackhouse in St Kilda, being deafened by a gale battering the island, made me realise how utterly insignificant I am. At the same time, I discovered a deeper connection to the planet than I’ve found anywhere else, a connection which gives me a sense of meaning, and a determination to take whatever small steps I can to protect it.
Music is the greatest power I have. These songs are about bringing people back together with each other and the natural world.” (Brian Briggs)
Whilst underwritten by Briggs lyrics, Oli Steadman brings vocals, bass lines and guitar riffs influenced by his South African roots, while multi-instrumentalist Jon Ouin has played a major role in shaping the songs into the most uplifting and immersive album the band have ever made and takes them another step away from the folk label that has often been attached to them. Beyonder was mixed by multi-Grammy-winner Oli Jacobs (Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, The 1975).
Offstage, Briggs manages a wetland nature reserve in south-west Wales. For him, conservation and songwriting are intertwined, “music is the greatest power I have,” he says, “the news is so scary these days; people are pulling apart, not together.” This understanding that bringing people together matters, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges, adds purpose and hopefulness to Beyonder. Where earlier records shimmered with pastoral charm, this one feels broader in scope and surer of itself with the band orchestrally confident and more emotionally expansive. The writing is classic in construction but ambitious in scale, giving the listener a set of songs that allow space for reflection yet never lacking the sense of wonder and melodic warmth that is true to all of Stornoway’s work.
On the day they take to the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Stornoway stand at a different kind of edge not just geographically, but artistically. What began on a remote Atlantic outpost has become their most ambitious and open-hearted record, a collection of songs about exploration, belonging, fragility and resilience, powered by the natural world but speaking directly to modern life.
BEYONDER tour to be announced soon.
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