Dutch Uncles - Polygon Hotel Dutch Uncles

After 18 years together, Dutch Uncles remain thrillingly impossible to pigeonhole. Always more interested in following the white rabbit than they are in playing by the rules, the Stockport-formed sextet push their instinctive, exploratory approach to new heights on latest LP Polygon Hotel and deliver some of the most richly rewarding music of their career.

Inspired by the people, places and chance encounters of Levenshulme, Manchester, where vocalist and lyricist Duncan Wallis has finally laid down firm roots, Polygon Hotel takes its name from a disused local pub, reimagined as a home for the records disparate characters and stories: a place where its laments, absurdities and breakthroughs could coexist. It’s a fitting metaphor for an album that moves between the personal and the surreal, the darkly comic and the quietly profound.

On Polygon Hotel, the band leaps headlong into the unknown; reinvigorated, and rediscovering the strange, playful chemistry that first united them. Self-produced and bringing together formal experimentation, atypical time signatures and labyrinthine melodies that burrow stealthily into your psyche, Polygon Hotel is the sound of Dutch Uncles at their most adventurous and unmistakably themselves.

Beneath its playful sonic exterior Polygon Hotel is, at its heart, an album about control – what we inherit, what we lose, and what we can still change – though Wallis only recognised the theme after its completion. The first half circles the past and its inescapable baggage, from lost time and death to old mistakes and the people we once were, before a gradual shift in perspective opens the door to something more hopeful.

It is their first album as a six-piece, with longtime touring multi-instrumentalist Henry Broadhead and guitarist Neil Wright joining Duncan Wallis, bassist Robin Richards, guitarist Peter Broadhead and drummer Andrew Proudfoot as full-time members of the band.