Colin Stetson – “The Love it Took to Leave You” (Released 27th September 2024)

Following last year’s Juno award winning album When we were that what wept from the sea, The love it took to leave you features 11 new pieces of emotionally scorching music. The album was recorded over a week in 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year-old former metalworks facility in Montreal with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel. From the album’s opening track Stetson charts a carefully sequenced ride, travelling through intense territories punctuated with tragic melodies that seek transcendence, epic and frenzied shredders, and many shades of scary beauty, betrayal, and redemption. This is the art of storytelling wrought instrumentally. The love it took to leave you is a perfect storm of technical, musical and compositional complexity and achievement.