15 years since they formed and eight since their last album, North London trio Red Sky July have announced the release of their fourth album “Misty Morning” for February 2025. Since the release of “Red Sky July” in 2015, the band has said farewell to Charity Hair (fiddle vocals) who left pre-pandemic to return to the United States and welcomed singer Haley Glennie-Smith, known for her work on soundtracks and as the solo vocalist of Planet Earth in Concert. She joins the core husband and wife team of Shelly Poole (formerly of Alisha’s Attic) and Ally McErlaine (previously guitarist for Texas).
Glennie-Smith is an old friend of Poole’s: “I hadn’t seen her in over a decade, but I still had her number and, incredibly, it still worked. She could have been anywhere in the world, but she was living ten minutes from us in North London. We met up the same day and she agreed to join the band. It couldn’t have been more serendipitous.”
Having previously scrapped one album before the pandemic hit, Red Sky July junked another written during the Covid lockdowns. Third time around, things flowed. “Once we decided to have no rules and no boundaries, we found our new sound,” says Poole “Ally and I are so used to working to strict remits on soundtracks and adverts. We had to ditch that mentality and just go with our guts.
“We challenged the instrumentation involved in the folk and Americana genres and used a lot of delays and electronic drones to create a much more cinematic sound. We also layered up some ‘found sound’ that we recorded in Scotland, Ireland, America, Spain and everywhere else on our travels. We made synth drones out of them, which became the bedrock of the album, sound-wise”.
Red Sky July has released the title track as their first single and it showcases their folkier fresh direction since the arrival of Glennie-Smith. ‘Misty Morning’ conjures a pastoral landscape bathed in the hazy rays of a summer dawn, its textures, melody and sensual harmonies. ” You’re the man I call when the bottle breaks/And the hazy-gin eyes can’t see anything straight” they sing over woozy electronics and jingle-jangle guitar. You can listen to ‘Misty Morning’ from the new album below.
