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Toby Martin's third solo album, 'I Felt The Valley Lifting', is out now! Written while living with his young family in Slaithwaite -- a post-industrial village in northern England -- and made in collaboration with local folk, rock and Persian musicians, the frontman and songwriter for Sydney band Youth Group draws from his newfound love of British Isles folk music and merges it with the kind of fuzzed-out, off-kilter indie rock that obsessed him in his youth. “The songs are all written from other people’s perspectives: our neighbours’ children, other parents at the school, local village identities,” says Toby Martin of his third solo record, I Felt The Valley Lifting. “But you don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to know that really the songs are all about me. I was working through my response to living in a strange new place through other characters.” As a regular attendee of the Folk Night at his local pub, The Swan, Martin grew a fondness for the music he heard being played and the stories being told. “It seemed to me that folk music was just sitting in the land, there to be used by the people who lived there. It’s as if the melodies and forms were growing in the landscape and they just needed to be harvested and then re-shaped into something new,” he says. “Folk music is an amazing raw product to do new things with.” “My idea was simple: to take the melodic feel of folk music, and some of its instrumentation -- fiddle, tin whistle -- but write lyrics that were about 21st century life in an English village. A life of Sky News, Brexit, papers, school appeals, caravan holidays,” he says. “And then give these folk forms a fuzzed-out rock n roll heart. And, naturally, add Iranian percussion and bagpipes!” The result -- recorded and mixed at Yellowarch Studios in Sheffield, UK, with Colin Elliot (Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley) -- is a heady mix of freak folk explorations, freewheeling melodicism, molten white noise and, in true Toby Martin style, sharply observed story-telling. Equal parts tender and abrasive, challenging and inviting, moving and slyly funny, I Felt The Valley Lifting sits comfortably alongside acts like Neutral Milk Hotel, The Decemberists and The Mountain Goats in your record collection, while also possibly being the only record made this millennium to use the word “widdershins”.