William Doyle – Great Spans of Muddy Time (White vinyl)

It’s difficult to comprehend how William Doyle is still in his twenties. It’s nearing a decade since he handed a CD-R demo to the Quietus co-founder John Doran at a gig, who loved it so much he set up a label to release Doyle’s debut EP (as East India Youth). A debut album, Total Strife Forever, followed in 2014, as did a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. A year later, Doyle was signed to XL, touring the world and about to release his second album – all by the age of 25.

It would be another four years before Doyle returned with his third full album, and the first under his own name (though he self-released four ambient and instrumental projects in the meantime). A work of enormous scope, ambition and detail, 2019’s Your Wilderness Revisited received ecstatic reviews, with Line of Best Fit calling it “a dazzlingly beautiful triumph of intention” and Metro declaring it an album not only of the year, but “of the century”.

Great Spans of Muddy Time arrives just over a year later, in spring 2021, as Doyle turns 30. In many ways it is the antithesis to Your Wilderness Revisited: Doyle’s unique exploration of pop, art-rock, ambient and idiosyncratic compositions – married with a voice that deftly glides from tender restraint to soaring peaks – remains, but it’s rawer and less polished now. “It was liberating and felt like a nice tonic to how long the last album took and how much blood, sweat and tears went into it,” he says.