Toria Wooff sets her goth-folk album Aleister for 12 January

Toria Wooff has dated her second album, Aleister, for 12 January through Sloe Flower Records, and put out its lead single, The Morrigan, with a video. The Lancashire songwriter works in a goth-folk register, and everything about the announcement points the same way.

The record was written in a narrow window. Wooff finished her self-titled debut and then, in the gap before it came out, wrote the album that follows it. James Wyatt produced. The subject matter is heavy and specific: grief, obsessive compulsive disorder, infertility and recovery, which is a more exposed set of themes than most second albums are built on.

Much of the early work happened away from a studio. Wooff and Wyatt took a guitar and some microphones to the small Welsh cottage that ended up on the album cover, and the snow, the silence and the stone walls did the rest. "The setting encapsulated everything we wanted the new album to be," Wooff said, and she credits it with shaping the production before they ever got into a proper room.

The Morrigan has one of the better origin stories of the year. It came from the theory that the voices people hear in woodland, taken for centuries as ghosts or deities, are crows repeating human speech back at them. A song about folklore turning out to be birds is a neat fit for a writer working this territory.

The video matches it. Light In The Tower, a Manchester outfit, directed a clip that leans on the unsettling atmosphere and analogue look of 1970s British folk horror, which is a specific enough reference that anyone who knows those films will recognise the grain of it immediately.

The production palette across the record runs to tape saturation, drones, vintage keyboards and orchestral additions sitting alongside acoustic instrumentation. Wooff's writing is rooted in traditional British and Irish folk recordings, coloured by darker and more mysterious influences, which is the line the whole album walks.

Aleister runs to eleven tracks: the title song, The Morrigan, Noiselessly, Good Mother, Black Shuck, Heather, Eileen, Battering Ram, Poor Company, House On The Hill and Wintering. Black Shuck, for anyone unfamiliar, is the name of an East Anglian folk devil, and it sits on a tracklist that is at least half concerned with the same world.

She has dates on either side of the release. Manchester's Halle St Michaels comes first, on 31 October 2026, and a UK run follows in March 2027 taking in Rochdale, Glasgow, Leeds, Eaglescliffe, London, Brighton, Norwich, Birmingham, Chester and Hebden Bridge.

Our earlier note on this story recorded that no tracklist and no tour dates had been published. Both are on The Line of Best Fit's page, and both are listed above. Confirmed release dates sit on the release calendar, and the rest of our coverage from this end of the scene is on the indie hub.