“The return of south Wales’ utterly wild, cosmic, nature-attuned four-piece Islet is enormously welcome news.” Pitchfork, May 2013

The fearless Welsh band are set to release their new album, Released By The Movement, this autumn, on band member Mark Daman Thomas’s own Shape Records. This is an ambitiously explorative work, an intense and immersive follow up to last year’s widely celebrated debut LP Illuminated People.

Opener Triangulation Station is freaked-out psychedelic circus soundtrack for the ages, with vocals thrown back and forth between Mark and Emma Daman Thomas, bowled along by tricksy drum parts and twisted tangles of rhythm and melody. It’s an opening burst of brightness that bears witness to the unbridled joy of their explosive live shows.

On this record they “go free”. They sing of their love and of their anger, and the joy and pain of their “obsessive need to freak” (Carlos). They sing without words at all, as the record plunges into the more nocturnal sounding depths of Tripping Through The Blue Room (Part II). Woven together by John Thomas’s guitar and Alex Williams’s bass, this track is seized by the almost gothic dread that snakes through the record.

These songs were recorded with the band’s good friend Stephen Black – also known as the artist Sweet Baboo. With Black on the controls, the album was recorded and mixed in practice spaces and bedrooms in Cardiff with no engineers or outside input, giving the group the freedom to work without inhibition, recording stream-of-consciousness sonic journeys alongside unruly maximalist adventures. Islet reinvent themselves with every song, playing each others instruments, drumming over drums and splashing sonic colours over each others parts. Each member is malleable, switching instruments and approach to better serve the emotional tone of each track. A good measure of trust is necessary in a group with such an egalitarian position on instrumentation, and love is fundamental in this band, who count two brothers and a husband and wife in their number.

The love that the Cardiff four-piece have received since forming in 2009 has much to do with their single-minded attitude and independent ethics – releasing on their own label, organising cross-artform events, publishing zines and disseminating them for free at live performances. This recording draws heavily on the intensity and energy of Islet playing together as a band. Their often unpredictable live shows incorporate elements of hallucinatory ceremony and performance art and this is evident in this album. Their naturally experimental approach and their own unique inner logic has created these nine unworldly jams, a window into their own unorthodox world. This is a genuinely left-field record, a record that rings with defiance.