For some time Graham Reynolds‘ music has inhabited a curious space between concert halls, dance theatres and cinema screens. If you’ve heard his film scores – for Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight or the animated intricacies of A Scanner Darkly – you’ll know Reynolds’ gift for turning scenes into musical landscapes. On Mountain, the map is rather more personal. Rather than having a guiding narrative from outside, he ventures inward, transplanting flickers of memory into wide orchestral sweeps and hushed electronics.
From the off, the album cover whispers the theme: a solitary triangular peak poking into the blankness, like the unspoken challenges we carry within us. Press play, and ‘Monadnock’ – named for the first peak Reynolds ever climbed – unfolds in a gentle overture: murmuring strings, a drift of chords, each note forming an outline of something bigger on the horizon. The hush soon widens to a cinematic swirl, reminding you that even alone on a mountain path, drama can still take hold. That drama is embedded in the name “Mountain” itself: these are primal, ancient shapes scoured by time, as fierce as they are quietly enduring.
Reynolds recorded Mountain without the limitations of a film reel. He’s said it’s his “first real solo album,” free from the usual constraints of soundtrack deadlines or story beats. Yet ironically, the record still has a cinematic glow – you can feel the slow pan of the camera, the zooming in before a revelation. ‘Enchanted Rock’ might be the best example: orchestral drums come thundering in a booming tempo, calling to mind a panoramic desert sky blackening before a storm. Then come the strings, swirling gently at first, answering the thunder like wind shivering across sun-scorched earth.
Throughout, Reynolds switches between epic scale and minute detail. On ‘Long Island Sound,’ he conjures a childhood memory of water once choked with pollution and now returning to life. Subdued electronics glint like late-evening light on wave tops, while the strings echo somewhere between sorrow and quiet hope, as though the sea is speaking in ebbing turns. ‘The Lost Weekend’, inspired by Billy Wilder’s 1945 classic, takes a different route – a film-noir cityscape after midnight. There’s a lonely hum to it, a drifting clarinet line or a pensive vibraphone that suggests an after-hours bar where regrets swirl around with ice in the leftover bourbon. Later, ‘The Lost Weekend (Revisited)’ picks up its theme and, like Max Richter in Blue Notebooks, lets a solo piano give its own testimony. Reynolds, even without a film, wants to keep telling us stories in every chord.
A quietly dazzling aspect is the partnership with the production duo Peter Talisman (British artists Greg Feldwick and Samuel Organ). They add subtle, genre-hopping brushstrokes to Reynolds’ compositions, weaving in synth motifs or textured percussion that shimmer at the edges. It’s as though they have one ear on the wide, orchestral horizon and the other on man-made urban rhythms, letting mechanical pulses hiss underneath polished violin lines. That friction – the old and the new, the wild and the concrete – underscores Mountain as a reflection on how nature and humanity meet and become entangled.
At the album’s midpoint, Reynolds gives us a breathtaking surprise: ‘Prophet Harmonic,’ a careening collision of pianos and jazz drums that roars like a sudden downpour. Starting with a quiet, searching melody, it quickly erupts into a riot of dissonance. Two pianos call and respond in spiralling patterns; drums pelt in polyrhythms. It’s mayhem, yet orchestrated with a composer’s discipline, conjuring that moment when weather flips in a heartbeat and the mountain’s calm grows charged with raw power.
When a human voice finally appears, it’s on ‘Linger In Silence,’ where Italian singer and Fire Record label partner Marta Del Grandi’s soft hush of vocals parts the clouds. For so much of Mountain, the instruments have the reins, so hearing that gentle, human echo is like encountering a solitary figure singing near a campfire. Returning to the earlier melody of ‘Prophet Harmonic’ her words add a distant and dreamy quality, like a lullaby drifting through the pines, but they sweeten the record’s introspective edges.
Just when the journey feels at its end, Reynolds offers a graceful epilogue: ‘Splendor Falls’, inspired by Tennyson’s poem and a grandfather’s recitation. A fractured synthetic voice emerges, half-human, half-machine, supported by cello-like strings. It’s uncanny: a lullaby sung by an AI, or a memory glitch as old recitations slip through digital cracks. A final hush, and the album closes.
In Mountain, Graham Reynolds finds majesty in both nature and memory. These compositions breathe like living landscapes: serene foothills, sudden storms, strange echoes of synthetic life reclaiming dormant vistas. Despite its imposing title, Mountain is ultimately human and inward, coaxing us upward step by step. Like a hiker needs patience with nature, Mountain demands a quiet attentiveness from start to finish. And if you give it that, you’ll find that Graham Reynolds’ first truly solo album is a remarkable peak in an already mountainous career.
‘Mountain’ is released 28th March via Fire Records.
