(to survive, or live through, the winter)

Overwinter was written and recorded in Brighton in 2018 and 2019; its nine songs mostly came from day and night-time walks around the city in the winter, conversations with people sleeping rough on the seafront, in parks, and around new luxury apartment developments. Everyone was (and is) trying to get through a bleak period: overwintering. In 2018 Andrew was also writing the score for the BBC1 feature documentary about Grenfell, and attended some of the silent marches in West London. That tragedy of neglect really focused a sense that our towns were being hollowed out, and that things as they were couldn’t and shouldn’t continue.

In 2018 Grasscut were commissioned to make a film exploring 100 years of material in the Wessex Film & Sound Archive. These old and forgotten recordings – domestic, political and military – inspired the song ‘The Archive’, and themes of British identity, our relationship with our past and future, haunt Overwinter. But in unearthing the recorded past, there is a also, in songs like Coprolite Tip and Root & Branch, a sense of opportunity, and that something better can sometimes emerge from the mess of the past and light our way forward. Even a coprolite tip with poisoned water.