SAIRIE have finally gone full album, and Beneath the Spreading Tree wastes no time setting its mood: late-summer colour sliding towards something colder. The record opens with Song for the Winter, a Pentangle-leaning scene-setter where birds “climb higher”, hills “glow brighter” and waves “call out louder” — all gorgeous surface, with peril gradually rising underneath.

The Brighton-based band have been building to this since 2019, releasing a run of singles and EPs that move between folk material, originals and modern covers. Earlier this year, they dropped a double A-side that paired the ballad May Carol with Françoise Hardy’s Tous Les Garçons et Les Filles, with singer Emma Morton handling both.

Morton’s voice is a big part of the pull here: an indie-pop, choirgirl-like brightness that pops on tracks such as Harder Than It Seemed. That song is powered by Andy Thomas’s heavy, “meaty” bass, while the vocal style hints back to folk singers like Maddy Pryor.

Elsewhere, the sweetness twists. The Breeze on the Meadow leans into stranger textures, with Jon Griffin’s harmonium forming a wasp-like drone, alongside Maria Marzaioli’s violin and Alice Eldridge’s cello.

Across the album, the musicianship stays tight and the arrangements feel like finely crafted 1970s curios without slipping into fancy-dress pastiche. Traditional material sits alongside originals: there are dense takes on The Gairdner and the title track, whose story echoes the execution tale found in the Scottish ballad Gilderoy.

And when Sairie go dark, they do it with a smile. Three Knots (led by Griffin) starts out like a sugar-coated duet before dropping “into the depths”, while The Green Light captures the giddy detail of young love — “What makes your heart beat fast and slow?” — before its narrative shifts, subtly but devastatingly.