Delmer Darion

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, the astonishing second album by Delmer Darion, is a collection of stories about human spirit, ambition, and the reckless naivety of great adventures. Written in the spirit of scientific romance, by way of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, it’s an album of two divergent halves. The first half swans through dizzying tales of human achievement backed up by hypnotic blends of shoegaze, ambient, industrial alt-rock and doom-folk as a carousel of vocalists – Kiran Leonard, Bingo Fury, Anna B Savage and Slaughter Beach, Dog – bring their archives to life.

The album’s second half features the band’s most ambitious work to date: an 18-minute spoken word epic rooted in Arthurian legend, about the tragic sinking of the HMY Iolaire off the coast of Stornoway in 1919. Collaborating with Guatemalan-born cellist and composer Mabe Fratti (named one of Pitchfork’s Artists changing the future of music in 2023) and award-winning Welsh actor Morfydd Clark, best known for her lead roles in A24’s Saint Maud and the Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Delmer Darion’s accounts of heartache and hopelessness hold endless wonder, exploring our relationship with music and literature in times of crisis. ‘Iolaire’ is a reckoning of how, in spite of our grand sense of place on Earth and in the universe, nature can still brutalise us.

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage lands three years after the duo’s debut album Morning Pageants found a slow-burning critical acclaim, praised as a “rare paradigm shift in underground music” by Electronic Sound, and named “one of the most transfixing listens of the year” by Clash.

Delmer Darion’s one consistency is the total intrigue that follows their creations, existing like curios plucked from thin air or deeply excavated. Nothing else sounds remotely like them. 

Experimental electronic producer duo Delmer Darion are back with news of their sophomore album Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage alongside galactical new single White Dawn Fog, an industrial lament of human ambition featuring a mercurial guest vocal from Anna B Savage. In the accompanying music video, created by Oliver Jack from the band, a V-2 rocket is slowly unearthed among a strange lunar landscape; a transfixing watch under the hauntingly corrosive track.

Tom Lenton from the band explains: “White Dawn Fog is about the best and worst of the scientific romance spirit: it’s about flying to the moon and about the ballistic missiles that first crossed the Kármán line, which were a vital step towards the development of spacecraft. The track retells an early section of H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (1901), where two men travel to the moon, find a desolate landscape, and then watch it come to life with strange plants. It transforms towards the end to depict two scenes at once: the beautiful lunar morning in Wells’ book and the V-2 missile strike on the Cine Rex in Antwerp, which was the deadliest single missile strike in the Second World War.”

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, the astonishing second album by Delmer Darion, is a collection of stories about human spirit, ambition, and the reckless naivety of great adventures. Written in the spirit of scientific romance, by way of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, it’s an album of two divergent halves. The first half swans through dizzying tales of human achievement backed up by hypnotic blends of shoegaze, ambient, industrial alt-rock and doom-folk as a carousel of vocalists – Kiran Leonard, Bingo Fury, Anna B Savage and Slaughter Beach, Dog – bring their archives to life.

The album’s second half features the band’s most ambitious work to date: an 18-minute spoken word epic rooted in Arthurian legend, about the tragic sinking of the HMY Iolaire off the coast of Stornoway in 1919. Collaborating with Guatemalan-born cellist and composer Mabe Fratti (named one of Pitchfork’s Artists changing the future of music in 2023) and award-winning Welsh actor Morfydd Clark, best known for her lead roles in A24’s Saint Maud and the Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Delmer Darion’s accounts of heartache and hopelessness hold endless wonder, exploring our relationship with music and literature in times of crisis. ‘Iolaire’ is a reckoning of how, in spite of our grand sense of place on Earth and in the universe, nature can still brutalise us.

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage lands three years after the duo’s debut album Morning Pageants found a slow-burning critical acclaim, praised as a “rare paradigm shift in underground music” by Electronic Sound, and named “one of the most transfixing listens of the year” by Clash. 

Delmer Darion’s one consistency is the total intrigue that follows their creations, existing like curios plucked from thin air or deeply excavated. Nothing else sounds remotely like them.