“Radiant yet seamless piece of art-pop” – Uncut (8/10)
“Seesawing between pristine songcraft and experimentalism makes for a diverse, satisfying whole” – MOJO (⅘)
“Doyle has uncovered a maximalist Lynchian heaven from the undergrowth” – Loud & Quiet (10/10)
“Muddy Time is bewildering, gorgeous and riveting in equal measure, a grand collage of the finest moments of soft-focus thinking-person’s rock from the past 50 years.” – Line of Best Fit (9/10)
Great Spans of Muddy Time, the latest album from art-pop savant William Doyle, is out today, and with its release sees him realise his vision of the Great British Pop Eccentric he’s been tinkering away at for near on a decade. Across its 13 tracks, Doyle flits between Cleaners from Venus style art pop new wave earworms and more abstract instrumental compositions, tying them together with a grainy analog charm, a product of having been recorded to tape.
For all that, it’s an album that nearly didn’t happen, a hard drive failure wiping years of work, sending Doyle back to the start. The music that then followed was more immediate and instinctive, yet in that less laboured over approach became more natural-sounding somehow, a kind of effortless, intuitive expression that allowed the songs to sit together with a strange ease. Strange, because while the record stands as an ode to the power of accident, instinct and intuition, the result is far from an anomaly: this celebration of the imperfect album is one that required years of honed craft and dedicated focus to achieve. “For the first time in my career, the distance between what I hear and what the listener hears is paper-thin,” Doyle says. “Perhaps therein reveals a deeper truth that the perfectionist brain can often dissolve.”
Additionally and certainly unimaginable just a few months ago, William Doyle will be playing some live shows in the UK in December, as listed below. Tickets are on sale as of right now and available here. More immediately, to mark the album’s release, tonight Doyle will be playing songs from the album as part of a live stream event in partnership with DiceFM. Further information and tickets available here.
Buy/stream Great Spans of Muddy Time HERE
