Pictish Trail: Island Family (Fire/Southbound/digital outlets)

Some years ago Johnny Lynch (who is Pictish Trail) said he wasn't much drawn to Nature and found it boring, this despite living on Scotland's remote Isle-of-Eigg (pop 100) which lies south of Skye off Scotland's wild North Atlantic-battered west coast.

He was there for more than a decade where he started his own label (Lost Map), recorded, founded a music festival and toured beyond the shores.

However Covid changed all that, not the least he had to acknowledge his surroundings much more as he could go nowhere else.

Which has lead to this follow-up to the excellent Thumb World.

But this is not some bucolic reverie about birds, sky, the unforgiving sea or quiet reflection.

An outlier in more ways than one, he pounds through the rowdy electro-rock distortion of the grinding five minute-plus Natural Successor (“chaos lies . . . I can't breath”) and even the title track punches off a staccato and filthy electronic beat even as it considers the universe, death and the homefires.

In the Land of the Dead has a cheap beat and minimalist keyboard part like an Eighties video game.

Other titles include It Came Back, Nuclear Sunflower Swamp and Remote Control (the most approachable and poppy song here, albeit fuzzily distorted).

Aside from the widescreen Melody Something about the morphing of the seasons which e dges towards Flaming Lips territory and the delicate Thistle, Pictish Trail is closer to mid-period Beck and the more measured aspects of Radiohead than anything even in the far corners of alt.folk.

If Lynch's underground rock has gone past you because you'd seen the name and presumed Lynch to be some beardy folk singer, think again.

He's beardy and he's a singer, but there's clearly something strange in the waters of the Isle-of-Eigg.