Spafford Campbell Headline Show - The Grove (Support: Ben McElroy)

Spafford Campbell are twenty-something mould-breakers, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell. The two first met as teenagers playing traditional music. The connection, they say, was immediate. The duo Spafford Campbell began playing live in 2018, prompting double takes with their delicacy, dynamism and seemingly telepathic exchanges, with the startling intimacy of musical conversations nurtured in improv-led writing sessions. Their latest album, Tomorrow Held, is a visionary body of eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, and fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox.

Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Whichever you choose, Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre—and finds gold in the embers. While redolent of Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 opus Spirit of Eden and riven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is a work of bold singularity. A whole greater than the sum of its parts—parts that include effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment.

The duo play Nottingham this November. Get your tickets now.