There is a specific frequency where nostalgia meets innovation, and Bobby Wratten has seemingly built a permanent residence there. With ‘Colours Yet To Be Named’, the third LP from Lightning in a Twilight Hour, the project moves beyond the constraints of traditional indie pop into a realm of shaping sounds and digital sculpting. If ‘Overwintering’ (Elefant), Bobby Wratten’s critically adulated 2022 release, was the sound of hibernation, his latest offering, ‘Colours Yet To Be Named’, is the complex, thawing landscape that follows. Wratten, the architect behind the indie-pop canon of The Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars, has long understood that melancholy is not a single emotion, but a spectrum. Here, alongside producer Ian Catt and longtime collaborators Anne Mari Davies, Beth Arzy, and Michael Hiscock, he paints with shades we haven’t yet learned to classify. Recorded between the autumn of 2024 and spring 2025, this album sees Catt pushing the envelope of what pop music can physically hold. The methodology is fascinating: improvised digital landscapes were captured first, with song structures slowly emerging from the mist later. The result is an album that feels discovered rather than constructed.
Photo by Beth Arzy
To call this an album of “songs” feels almost reductive; it is a curation of atmospheres. The record prioritizes the soundworld—a tactile environment of alternate tunings, clicks, crackles, and mournful synths—before the lyrics even penetrate. It is a masterclass in texture. Tracks like “Graph Paper” thrum with electronic experimentation, while “The No-Sound of Falling Snow” stretches into spacious post-rock. The interplay of voices is arguably the instrument of highest value here. Anne Mari Davies provides a vocal range that moves from spoken word to highly processed ethereal unison, while Beth Arzy anchors the harmony. When combined with Michael Hiscock’s dub-inspired basslines, they create a “soft cocoon” that allows the listener to sink into the gloom rather than simply observe it. Intellectually, the album is a travelogue through time and displacement. It traces a psychogeographical line from American poetry in England to English poetry in Switzerland, with stopovers in mid-sixties Paris and the stark authoritarianism of a dystopian cocoon. Wratten channels the experimental spirit of Brian Eno and the lyrical minimalism of Yoko Ono, creating vocal lines that must constantly recalibrate against shifting chordal tides.
Photo by Beth Arzy
From the shimmering pop of “Red Comet” to the uncertainty of tracks where storms encroach on tranquility, the album refuses to settle in one genre. It captures the feeling of the best kind of cry; painfully good, cathartic, and deeply necessary. While “Every Flame a Sunset” offers a glimmer of the drum-forward, vintage jangle of Wratten’s past, it serves only to deepen the surrounding autumnal haze. This is for the brokenhearted—a record where digital improvisation meets organic grief. ‘Colours Yet To Be Named’ is not easy listening (nor is it meant to be), but it is vital listening. It is a cocoon of sound that proves Wratten remains our most reliable narrator of the human heart’s darker, quieter corners. It is a self-contained statement of introspection that demands, and rewards, your full attention.
To have a listen or to order, please visit Elefant Records or
Bandcamp.
