Following two acclaimed experimental instrumental records in Feral Hymns (2021) and Acts of Light (2023), Hilary Woods returns on her new LP Night CRIÚ, out October 31st, to song form and most notably, to her voice. Crafting songs centered around it, Night CRIÚ’s intimate ecosystem of seven songs uses layers of vocal harmony and lyrics as ways to re-enter the body, and to speak to and uproot old scripts.
A ceremony of light and shade, Night CRIÚ’s unmoored sonic threads recall the cracks, fringes, forgotten agency and dormant personas that surface at night, waiting to be retrieved and integrated come daylight. Despite its economy, each song on Night CRIÚ breathes into an emotive expanse quintessential of Woods’s compositions, and true to her artistry, a search for new direction is ever present, expressed most keenly here in her writing for brass band and children’s choir.
A record that riles against bludgeoning monoculture in its reclaiming and mourning a lost innocence all at once, Night CRIÚ reaches to integrate lost and splintered parts of the whole, in making the unconscious conscious. Lyrically Woods subverts and reconfigures the inter-personal, her words serving as mottled photographic close-ups planted in the dark to bloom upward toward the light.
Inspired and energised by many influences including aspects of Czech and early Italian cinema, the revival of indigenous language, a personal history of attending parades, early music, the joy in dance, the immediacy of sound, and the present collective standing up for what it means to be human in the face of tyranny and oppression, Night CRIÚ was recorded between the West Coast of Ireland, Dublin, London, Latvia and Richmond Virginia between 2023 and January 2025.
These songs were chosen from many early home recordings that Woods held up as mirrors of juxtaposition to each other. Written and produced by Hilary Woods, Night CRIÚ was mixed by Dean Hurley with additional production by Oliver Turvey and Dean Hurley, mastered by Brian Lucey, featuring work by Hannah Fallon, Gabriel Ferrandini, The Hangleton brass band and Ajo Gonsenica.
For Woods “Each record is a life buoy, a raft, a snapshot, a marker in the sand, a date that requires me to meet it. Making records is a way of being”.
