Spafford Campbell - Tomorrow Held Album Launch

Real World Records has announced the signing of twenty-something mould-breakers and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell, a.k.a. Spafford Campbell. Their new album Tomorrow Held will be released by the label on 1 August 2025.

Tomorrow Held is a visionary work comprising eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox. Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Then know that Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre, finds gold in the embers. Forget about tomorrow, they say. Welcome to the now.

“Our music reflects our backgrounds,” says Campbell, who studied at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and performed as a sideman to Sam Lee, Sam Sweeney and iconic singer-guitarist Martin Simpson. “Owen’s fiddle playing has a wonderfully deep underpinning in tradition, which is sort of ever-present, so if we are trying to craft a sound with its own energy, that trad undertone can’t really ever get completely lost. Despite our differences in musical background we share a common priority, exploring a small, specific idea through a larger lens.”

The two first met as teenaged members of the National Youth Folk Ensemble, a grassroots initiative bringing together talented young musicians from across England to create and perform new arrangements of folk music. The connection, they say, was immediate. The duo Spafford Campbell began playing live in 2018, prompting double takes with their delicacy, dynamism and seemingly telepathic exchanges, with the startling intimacy of musical conversations nurtured in improv-led writing sessions.

“We realised that we both wanted to push accepted sounds into new territories,” says the Leeds-raised Spafford, a nominee for BBC Young Composer of the Year Award and a scholarship student at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Born to writer parents — his mother’s extended family also sing English folk songs — he grew fascinated with the drone-based fiddle stylings of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh of Irish superstars The Gloaming. For a while he toured with a vintage village green fair called Giffords Circus.

While redolent of Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 opus Spirit of Eden, and riven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is a work of bold singularity. A whole greater than the sum of its parts — parts that include effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, some electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment from Alex Lyon on bass clarinet and Ben Nicholls on double bass. 

“We made the quiet bits quieter and the loud bits louder,” says Spafford, “even though we came at the tracks from different standpoints. I’d be thinking, ‘That’s the one based on the feeling of a slow air’, where Louis would be like, ‘Yeah, the ambient freeze pedal track’.”

The album’s first single, ‘MacGill’ pays homage to the famed creative partnership of American singer/songwriters Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell: “It’s slightly more jazz-influenced in terms of harmony and sound than the other stuff on the record,” says Spafford. “We’re going to that sweet spot at the folky end of jazz.” The music video for ‘MacGill’ was filmed in the surroundings of Wiltshire Music Centre in the afternoon before a concert, simply capturing the essence of the duo’s live performance which exhibits an in-the-moment, intimate musical conversation.

Tomorrow Held is out 1 August 2025 and is available to pre-order on CD and LP. The single, ‘MacGill’, is available now on all digital platforms. Spafford Campbell will tour the album across the UK this autumn.

Tour Dates - got friends around the country - tell them about more shows!

OCT 12 SHEFFIELD Samuel Worth Chapel 
OCT 13 LEEDS The Attic 
OCT 14 NEWCASTLE The Cumberland Arms 
OCT 15 GLASGOW Glad Cafe 
OCT 16 EDINBURGH Voodoo Rooms 
OCT 17 MANCHESTER Something More Productive
OCT 21 BRIGHTON Folklore Rooms 
OCT 22 OXFORD Common Ground 
OCT 24 POOLE Lighthouse 
OCT 25 TOTNESS Ashburton Arts 
OCT 29 BRISTOL Wardrobe Theatre 
OCT 30 LONDON Round Chapel

Pre-order/listen: lnk.to/RW262

www.spaffordcampbell.com
instagram.com/spaffordcampbell
www.realworldrecords.com