Every Country's Sun

Mogwai's ninth studio album sees them reuniting with producer Dave Fridmann for the first time since 2001's Rock Action LP. Fridmann also worked with the band on 'Come On Die Young' (1999). It was recorded at Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York.

Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature contrasting sounds - towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume - and distills it beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. It's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk.

This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armour through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal title track, its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.