"an album of spare, striking beauty" Mojo ★★★★
“...a kind of Australian equivalent of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake” UNCUT 8/10

Produced by Greg Freeman (Portico Quartet, Peter Gabriel, Amy Winehouse) and recorded at StudiOwz, a converted chapel in the Welsh countryside, A Dark Murmuration of Words takes Barker’s clear, expressive vocals and warm acoustic aesthetic and subtly shifts her sound in the direction of contemporaries such as Laura Marling and Phoebe Bridgers. Lyrically probing, by turns both dark and optimistic, Barker searches for meaning through the deafening clamour of fake news and algorithmically filtered conversation, delivering a timely exploration of the grand themes of our age through the lens of what it means to return “home.”

Alluding to the album’s title, Barker references American writer Emily Dickinson: “ ‘If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves’ – like the starlings in a murmuration, where the movement of each individual bird is related to just seven of its closest neighbours, none of them aware of the mesmerising, fluctuating patterns being created by the flock.” 

Throughout the ten songs that make up the album, Barker draws connections between the familial, the local, and the global: a mother sings to her unborn child, asking for its forgiveness on ‘Strange Weather’; ‘When Stars Cannot Be Found’ explores the humbleness and comfort of the night sky when far away from home. Other highlights include the nostalgic ‘Return Me’, the gloriously defiant ‘Machine’ and the effortless album closer ‘Sonogram’.

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