A slow and transcendent nature walk.
Fletcher Tucker releases his 3rd album Kin via Gnome Life Records and Adagio 830 on August 15, 2025. The album is an ambient-folk experiment meant to capture and share fragments of the natural magic of the world with listeners.
This is Tucker’s first new album since 2020 under his given name, and his 9th album in counting all of the projects he has been involved in. Tucker is also a co-founder to non-profit ecological education program Wildtender, and composed Kin “while hiking hundreds of miles through the remote Big Sur backcountry,” according to the album’s press release. Tucker’s goal for Kin, as stated in the press release, was “to exhale enchantment back into the living world.”
Ritualistic ambience, droning chants and the low and incessant hum of wind instruments make up the auditory array of Kin. The album keeps a deliberate pace that meanders between intimate slowness to experimental folksy chaos; rhythms are never fully regular, and Tucker’s lyrics are like a druidic sort of poetry delivered in three-voice chords which keep on single notes for minutes at a time. Sounds of crickets, cicadas and clinking chimes sometimes take the forefront; in other moments, strange gongs, clacks and thumps form a percussive backdrop to the drone.
Kin opens with “A Candle,” a bass-heavy track full of ceremonial hums and somber recitations; second track “Great Flowering Mind” quiets into a meditative process of gentle notes which seem to nearly span its impressive eleven-and-a-half minute runtime. “Pregnant Emptiness” is the first fully instrumental track from the album, with only a subtle instrumentation behind the sounds of nighttime wilderness ambiance.
Midway point “Only Dancing” disrupts the serenity with a cacophonic menagerie of percussion and constant chanting. Clocking in at the second longest track at almost eleven minutes, “To Light a Fire” is arguably the highest point in the album—it serves as a kind of lyrical retelling of the birth of the speaker’s child between sporadic flute and drum lines all played out over a dramatic backing note.
Sixth track “Born Back Into the Earth” is an instrumental mix of soft percussion and bells with minimal instrumentation besides. Final track “The Breathing Night” is also an instrumental, with its calm and naturalist folk sound serving as a conclusion statement to the album.
Kin is Fletcher Tucker’s way of sharing his slice of the natural world with the listener. It’s both a meditation and a religion of sorts; it transports the listener to those hundreds of miles of Big Sur country and ensures they value what they see.
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