For three decades, Mostly Autumn and Bryan Josh have unerringly followed their own path. As Yorkshire’s finest make a splash with Seawater, their bandleader discusses writing on instinct, reflections on mortality, and the challenges and rewards of living and breathing music.

Words: David West Images: Howard Rankin

Prepare for an ocean of emotion with Mostly Autumn’s Seawater .

“Mostly Autumn is life, loss and nature, generally speaking,” says founding father Bryan Josh. “We’re moved by nature, the sadness of loss, and the light and glory of life, making the most of it. Those are the messages that have always come through and I guess we just do it in different ways on each album.” FromFor All We Shared…in 1998 through to the freshly hatchedSeawater, those themes permeate and define the distinctive style of Mostly Autumn. Seawater is the follow-up to 2021’s Graveyard Star, an album that found Josh in a distinctly sombre mood, bearing the mental toll of lockdown.

The mood may be more buoyant, but Seawater is a record of powerful currents, with Josh’s musical craftsmanship apparent in how he structures and paces the listening experience to generate the strongest reaction in the listener.

“That was like a diary of a really bad time,” he says. Seawater, by contrast, is “not as heavy and weighed down as Graveyard Star,” with Josh describing the songs as “almost uplifting, in a way”.

“An album is a song in itself. You have to feel where the energy and emotion lead you from song to song. It should flow and take you to places as it goes along.”

“An album is a song in itself,” he explains. “You have to feel where the energy and emotion lead you from song to song. It should flow and take you to places as it goes along. In some ways the album was written a lot like that, I’d be working on a song and thinking, ‘What does it feel like should come next?’ It was an instinct-driven album, really.”