Poliphilos

Every album needs a beginning, and “Eternal Echoes”, structured, quietly, as a Hero’s Journey across its ten songs has “Underwurlde” where that journey starts.

Let’s start with the music.

Underneath the modern production is an old Finnish folk song from Karelia, Finland so the bones of the melody are older than anything else on “Eternal Echoes“. ABBA’s “Eagle” was the other big pull, that same sense of something soaring and slightly cold at once.

I wanted the vocal delivery to lean into the folkloristic, rural, almost primitive side of the material, so I sang and wrote it in a style that’s a bit shamanistic: the same lyrical ideas returning again and again in slightly different shapes, until it starts to feel hypnotic and hopefully not repetitive. That pattern is doing the work a chorus usually does, except it’s circling instead of landing.

Unlike some of the other songs on this album, which sat in a drawer for twenty or thirty years before I finally published them, “Underwurlde” is brand new. I wrote and composed it during the winter of 2025–26, in the studio with my producer Juho, which meant the song took shape almost in real time rather than being excavated from an old minidisk.

The title, though, is borrowed from the magical era of the Dark 80s.

Underwurlde from 1984 was one of my favorite computer games, a Play The Game’s follow-up to Sabre Wulf, released for my first ever personal computer, ZX Spectrum. Underwurlde is all flip-screen caverns and a knight wandering through an underworld he never asked to be in.

Most of my musical DNA also comes from that narrow window, roughly 1975 to 1985, and it turns out the games did as much to shape me as the records of that time did. Ah, those Christmas holiday nights with Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy while listening to Duran Duran B-sides!

I didn’t set out to write a song named after a 1980s platformer, but once the myth I’d landed on turned out to be about brothers who end up trapped beneath the world by their own doing, the old title simply fit, and I took it.

What does catastrophe sound like?

Before I wrote a word, I went looking through world mythology for the right shape of catastrophe — something that could plausibly open a hero’s journey. A few contenders I seriously considered along the way:

• The Kalevala’s Louhi, who steals the sun and moon from the sky and plunges the world into darkness — the most Finnish possible answer, and almost too on-the-nose for that reason alone.
• Ragnarök’s Fimbulwinter, the three-year, sunless winter said to precede the Norse end of the world — close in mood, but that story ends in rebirth, and I needed something that stayed a warning.
• Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods to give it to humanity — the clearest ancestor of the “taking something that wasn’t yours to take” idea, but too well-worn already to carry a new myth on its back.
• The flood stories — Gilgamesh, Noah, the Greek Deucalion — all catastrophe, but none of them about theft, which was the piece I actually needed.

None of them had quite the right shape until I got to Grimm’s “The Moon.” It turned out to fit better than anything else I found: a fledgling world thrown into crisis, someone who has to go and do something about it.

But there’s also a moral center to that fairy tale that I found genuinely interesting, independent of anything religious — the idea that if something has been placed in the sky, it isn’t a human’s place to make themselves its master. I’m not making a religious argument here. I just think it’s a striking moral fable, and it gave the song a spine.

For the sound of it, Juho did what I asked: placed the song geographically somewhere. Namely, it was important for me that each of the songs on the album “hail from somewhere”, and where Juho placed “Underwurlde” is quite something! His mix of sampled guitars, synths, my own background vocals, and Arabian bells woven together push the primitive feeling further than a straightforward folk arrangement would have gotten us. I seriously considered bringing in a session guitarist at one point, but Juho’s sampled guitar work did exactly what I needed.

Sometimes the right tool turns out to be a great producer rather than another musician in the room.

One has to leave Underwurlde

“Underwurlde” sets the scene of the catastrophe. What comes after — the leaving of “Skylark“, the strange mentor in “Poliphilos’s Party“, the monster in “My Dreams Of Tomorrow“, the falling in love in “European Son” and the falling apart in “I Held You Once“, the way home in “Morning” — is for you to notice as you go, if you want to. I’ll say this much: listen closely to the very end of the album, on “Last Rose Of Summer.” The wind you hear there, blowing over an empty plain, is the same sound “Underwurlde” opens with. The album closes the circle it opens.

Because it’s more atmospheric than most of my records, I let this one stay loose rather than pin it down further. Some songs want an explanation. This one, I think, wants to just be heard.

More about “Underwurlde” here.