ALBUM REVIEW: Hen Ogledd – Discombobulated

Weird World/Domino

Released: 20.02.26

“They want us to fail, But Workers can win. Shake”

At this point, Hen Ogledd are out on their own somewhere, at the outer limits of genre and convention. Even compared to their last couple of albums, Discombobulated is a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic, bewildering gem. Arising from a period of upheaval and change, the band have found strength in their community – musical, social, familial – and nailed their political colours to the mast more clearly than before without ever being hectoring or didactic.

Discombobulated is ROUSING.

When lead track Scales Will Fall was first made available at the tail end of 2025, my initial reaction was that maybe they’d gone too far: there was Dawn Bothwell’s angry but unifying ‘bard rap’ delivered in her rich Strathclyde accent, there were heraldic brass fanfares, an almost free jazz breakdown midway through, a leaning into what we can’t deny is a bit prog. It was a lot. By the second listen I was more intrigued, by the fifth I was starting to get it. Now – dozens of listens later (and dozens of viewings of the absolutely magnificent video, a glorious mix of dressing-up-box madness, ancient landscapes, The Time Bandits and Rhodri Davies’ heroic knee bend) – I think it’s the best thing any of them have ever done, and the best track released last year. It’s an anthem for our times and I get a bit overwhelmed by it. It was also the first indication that Discombobulated was going to be something special.

The second track released ahead of the album was Clara, a lovely but unsettling folk ballad with a choral section that sounds like how I imagine the alien choir in Michel Faber’s Book Of Strange New Things and pairs Bothwell’s gentle, unadorned voice with Rhodri Davies’ rich Welsh plainsong. All this plus a booming voice interjecting ‘DISCO’ from time to time and a video that’s like a fever-dream episode of eighties D&D-based show Knightmare.

Released just this week, the third and final preview is End Of The Rhythm, which is to be frank, an absolute banger. A frantic, urgent post-punk rhythm, another explicit call for unity and resistance set to an incredibly infectious melody. I’ve no idea if indie discos are still a thing, but this would properly go off!

The rest of the album is similarly diverse and dizzying, inspiring and perplexing. There’s a host of guests from the underground, used in often defiantly pop ways – a big shout out to Aussie drummer Will Guthrie, who apparently gave the band the focus they needed to make Discombobulated happen and whose remarkable and lengthy solo leads us into album centrepiece Clear Pools, before Sally Pilkington’s yearning, aching voice takes over. Clear Pools is a mysterious delight, impossibly lovely and full of rich detail. Dead In A Post-Truth World is a Welsh/English examination of the flagshaggers (‘gamwn’), with Richard Dawson suggesting that the gammon have ‘got it wrong, your brain’s been poisoned for so long, so long, dead in a post truth world’. Closer Land Of The Dead feels like a Welsh companion to Dawson’s The Ruby Cord album, a medieval vision of a troubled, troubling world.

Elsewhere there are children’s voices, polyglot rhymes, fairy stories, Finnish metal legends. In Discombobulated, I can hear Robert Wyatt and Ivor Cutler, This Heat and The Watersons, Soft Machine and The Cure, politics and poetry, pure pop and free jazz. Discombobulated genuinely sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard, a band standing up for what really matters, and keeping their community close.