Maximo Park’s DUNCAN LLOYD reveals album number six, ‘Unwound’

Maximo Park’s DUNCAN LLOYD releases solo long-player number six ‘Unwound,’ his first album of new material via Scotland’s Reveal Records.

A somewhat darker offering than Lloyd’s previous works, ‘Unwound’ nevertheless continues with a sense of melancholy, written during a tough personal period leading to a sound greater in depth and ambition than previous releases.

The project began when Lloyd set to work with Julie McLarnon (The Vaselines, King Creosote, Brigid Mae Power) at Analogue Catalogue Studios in Ireland, and motivated by the trip across the Irish Sea, Lloyd returned to Newcastle to complete the album.

“I needed a break from all things online,” he said. “Stepping away from it and being closer to nature reignites the imagination, it’s kind of obvious but easy to forget how important it is. It’s an album about experience, throughout you get the sense that dynamics, speed and space were all careful considerations. I am sort of looking under the soil trying to shape the sounds I imagine and if possible, create something relatable that has a heart. I didn’t want it to be one produced sound, I wanted it to feel like different rooms, many spaces.”

“I partly had the book ‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard in mind. Every song is its own room with its own signature. This is probably my heaviest album, in sound and mood. There are songs that lean towards post-punk and with hypnotic rhythms that are darker in tone. I wanted it to feel like the listener can climb inside the sound rather than be on the outside looking in. I don’t want them to be in the cinema, I want them to be in the film or in the room, so it’s almost spooky.”

And with restrained, intimate lyrics, the album draws to a close with a song of lost opportunity, ‘A World Away Now.’

“Sometimes on a song the bass or percussion talks louder than a voice, so I mixed it like that. Sometimes nothing else contends if the emotion isn’t clear. When you hear musicians playing together, you are invited into something far more personal or engaging. You can’t always tell the detail, yet you can feel the dynamics – you can sense it is living.

“I may let guitars get loud and careen around if that’s where it wants to go. It can then go the other way and be minimal, economical. Although it is a very personal album, it’s also addressed to the stranger and, if the listener can relate – and even laugh about what life throws at us – then a connection lives.”  

‘Unwound’ was produced by Duncan Lloyd, and mastered by Carl Saff at Saff Mastering, Chicago.

CONNECT with Duncan HERE and Reveal Records HERE