Following the release of Mull Historical Society’s seventh album Dear Satellite on 8 April (Colin MacIntyre’s birthday) comes the new single Sleepy Hollow, out 27 May. The spring morning brightness and catchy hook make it perfect for these warmer months and is the natural progression from recent single The Ballad Of Ivor Punch, which has enjoyed plays on 6 Music, Amazing Radio and playlist on BBC Scotland with Mull headlining BBC Scotland’s Quay Sessions.

Dear Satellite was produced by Grammy award-winning Dom Morley, known for his work on Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, as well as working with Adele, Grinderman and Sting. He also produced Colin’s first album on Xtra Mile Recordings, City Awakenings, released in 2012. It is ten tracks of floating, positive, textually diverse pop songs. The songs Sleepy Hollow and This Little Sister may leap you into optimistic, slightly cheerful abandon but Why Do They Go So Soon wrings a little melancholy into the warmth.

The odd off-key whistling underpinning the rhyming acoustic pop of Bones meshes the weird elements you’d have expected from MHS of old, described by the Sunday Times as ‘with unconcealed fury it addresses the grotesque game of pass-the-parcel that the developed world is currently playing over the refugee crisis’. While the chiming synth-drive of The Ballad of Ivor Punch reaches into Arcade Fire-esque indie rock, All the Love Remains and Each Other captures the sweet and serious strumming that MHS has made his own.

The album closes with the reflective, sky-and-soul-searching Farewell to Finisterre, continuing the seeming interest of Xtra Mile Recordings bands in space and star gazing.

‘Every bit the Hebridean Sufjan Stevens. Terrific’ – 4/5, Q Magazine

‘Great hooks… up there with the best of them. This collection underlines his credentials as a storyteller’ – UNCUT