Solstice have announced the release of their 8th studio album, Clann, on April 4th, 2025 through specialist US label Progrock.com Essentials.
Voted Best Band in Prog magazine’s latest annual Reader’s Poll, and arriving on an exuberant wave of positivity created by previous albums Sia (2020) and Light Up (2022), both widely acclaimed within the prog community and beyond, Clann completes the most recent phase of Solstice’s 40-plus year career.
Boasting the same line-up since 2020, the members of Solstice channel their impressive individual talents to create music that melds elements of hi-intensity prog-folk, soaring new age, fragile ambiance, fresh funky pop-rock with world music leanings, and fist-pumping heavy rock jubilance, demonstrating a sophisticated, multifaceted modernity while retaining transcendent timeless qualities.
As band founder, composer, and guitarist (winner of Prog magazine’s most recent Best Guitarist Prog Award) Andy Glass explains, “Sia made me realize the potential and by the time we were working on Light Up the whole band had raised its game. I believed then that a trilogy of albums was what it would take to create our best work and track that journey. Clann is the final album in the Sia Trilogy and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. Let’s hope the universe likes it too.”
Check out the video for the first single “Firefly” below.
Solstice keyboardist Steven McDaniel laughingly confesses: “It’s terrifying to be in a band this good!” A lauded singer-songwriter in her own right, Ebony Buckle, backing vocalist and now a solid member of the Solstice family, reflects, “I love how these new songs feel like they’ve always existed.”
Enjoying both an artistic and commercial rebirth over the past 5 years, Solstice owe much to the addition of young singer Jess Holland in 2020, who brought with her not just a clear emotive voice that communicates both stridency and tenderness with equal ease and charm, but a beguiling energy that has directly impacted everyone in the band.
Andy Glass is eager to explain “Sia was our first album with Jess and what a total game changer that was. I’ve felt incredibly motivated and inspired ever since. Since then I seem to have this relentless appetite to take this music as far as we can. There’s nothing quite like feeling that kind of drive.”
Recorded both in a variety of recording studios and by individual band members at home, Clann includes a first in the band’s career with the track “Plunk” which features a brass section recorded at the beautiful Grand Chapel Studio in Toddington, Bedfordshire. Glass admits that “there might be a bit of a Big Big Train influence there somewhere!”
Pre-order Clann: CD | Colored Vinyl | Black Vinyl
Clann manages to cover a great deal of musical ground in its nearly 40-minute running time. Firefly opens up proceedings and will be familiar to many already through its airing at numerous gigs and its inclusion on both the band’s Live At The Stables and Return To Cropredy releases. Its pulse-pumping energy, hard-edged yet infectious grooves, whirling bursts of synth and violin and its glorious guitar solo lift the spirit and sweep us into Solstice’s mesmerizing world.
Elsewhere “Life” delivers smooth, soulful, modern pop with an elegant dance-friendly heart, and “Plunk” is taut swaggering funk in 7/8 with brass stabs and a left-field, gritty guitar solo. “Frippa” is built on an urgent, bluesy Crimson-esque riff in 5 and spotlights organ, violin, and even more incendiary guitar. The final track, the 14-minute “Twin Peaks,” in some ways harks back to what prog polymath and longtime Solstice fan Steven Wilson once described as the band’s “spacey and spacious” early material – it’s gentle, reflective, and airy with pastoral, folky strains, yet builds into a soaring expression of rapturous celebration and spiritual freedom.
Lyrically, the album continues to establish Solstice‘s themes of love, joy, peace, harmony, and acceptance, yet Clann admits that not everything in the garden is always rosy. Although longing for some ultimate redemption, both “Plunk” and “Frippa” feature a level of reproach for unidentified liars and cheats with “Plunk” even exercising some wry schadenfreude at the downfall of the song’s antagonist.
