The Cold Spells

Wrought from estuary-accented lichen, scrabbled from brine and moss, The Cold Spells emerged from the East London/Essex borders in the mid 2010s.

Their songs are modern laments filtered through electricity and concrete, where kitchen-sink psychedelia meets modern day folk. As indebted to the classic pop of the Beatles and Kinks as to the fragmented sound experiments of Broadcast and Arthur Russell, the Cold Spells attempt to make the familiar sound new and try to prove that there are still ways to get fresh fruit from an old tree.

Amidst the torrid stories, salted melodies, woodpecker beats, wheezing synths and knackered harmoniums, they’ve created a collection of vignettes into a time and space where magic is mundane and reality is distorted. It’s folkish music of outskirts, both geographically and in the sound’s persistent interplay of traditional song-craft and layers of digital effect oddities.


The Cold Spells are:

Tim Ward – Guitars/Vocals
Michael Farmer – Keyboards/Vocals

“It’s not so much the ghost in the machine as the moss in the circuit board”