Boa Morte play oddly-shaped melodic slowcore imbued and interspersed with elements of avant-folk, drone, electronic and even noise. Their music can be defiantly spacious and unhurried – a bit like their output: four albums in 25 years. But they recently succumbed to a creative fever-dream, somehow recording two full- lengths in the space of a week. Maybe the studio had something to do with it: Hellfire takes its name from an 18 th century satanic club that met in the nearby haunted hunting-lodge unwisely built upon an ancient passage grave. The phone signal in the studio was poor, but the spirits were well within range. At times, the band did feel possessed.

The band continue to eschew the obvious. The beginning of a Boa Morte song or album is certainly no guide to how it will end. Signal:Lost – the first of the two records – opens with a Reichian piece in 9/4 for piano and drums that disintegrates in under two minutes. The album concludes with an unsettling synth-infused contemporary folk-song flanked by instrumentals whose melancholy motif darkens with repetition into something far more menacing and final. In between you’ll hear everything from synth experimentation and off-the-cuff jamming to tongue-drum melody and ambient passages, but at the core is the band’s signature yet classic guitar- and piano-based songwriting, unorthodox drum interventions and the unerring melodic sensibility that has defined the band’s previous work.