17th April 2026: Empirical’s ‘Like Lambs: To The Slaughter’ available for pre order now – CD / DL / LP – featuring Ivo Neame & David Preston
The second Whirlwind release from award-winning ensemble Empirical is available for pre order today (out June 26)
Click Here to visit the album page, where you can also listen to the first single and pre order on CD / DL / LP.
ABOUT THE ALBUM
Empirical return with their second release on Whirlwind Recordings with a warning for our troubled times: their forebodingly titled eighth album, Like Lambs: To The Slaughter. Following vibraphonist and long-standing member Lewis Wright’s move to the USA, the award-winning UK jazz ensemble, featuring Nathaniel Facey on alto saxophone, Tom Farmer on double bass and Shaney Forbes on drums, have embraced a more flexible lineup. The trio enlist high-caliber guest artists to expand their sound, with long-time collaborators Ivo Neame on piano and David Preston on guitar lending their distinctive musical voices to the album.
A radical reworking of drummer Shaney Forbes’ unconventional long-form suite, first issued as a self-released EP, the album unfolds as an uninterrupted 51-minute musical story. It draws the listener into an irresistible maelstrom of changing emotional states, reaching its unsettling fever-pitch peak in the title segment of the suite. With this album Empirical have created an astounding and formally cohesive new articulation of their unique sonic world, made possible by their exceptional virtuosity and musical empathy and their daring emotional expressiveness. A standout release even by Empirical’s high standards.
Originally conceived during the pandemic, the album explores ever-more relevant questions around the human capacity for independent thought versus herd-like behavior, and the line between innocence and ignorance. “It’s a concept album in the sense that it’s got a story to tell about where we all find ourselves in the world today – over-stimulated and under-informed. It taps into the prevailing Zeitgeist that human civilization is hurtling toward collapse; something that is fired on by wilful ignorance and human destructiveness,” notes Forbes. While the music often reflects our frantic, split-attention world where individualism reigns supreme, it also represents a refusal to relinquish faith in the possibility of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment.
The album traverses the musical terrain between contemporary classical music, soundscape, post-bop and free jazz. The jazz of the 1960s has long been a guiding light for Empirical, not least in the way it represented Black musicians’ struggle for respect, freedom and civil rights, often drawing on their faith as a moral foundation. As Shaney Forbes explains: “Empirical has never been an overtly political band. But our music has always been informed by our personal experiences of living in a diverse, increasingly individualistic society, and all the frictions that can entail. We live in a moment where the progress that past generations have fought for is being attacked and division is tearing society apart. At the same time, each of us in Empirical has a personal faith and we share a belief that we can transcend the current crises. Our music is a manifestation of working together as a true collective and finding solutions through collaboration rather than competition.”
The opening track ‘The Garden of Beginnings: Innocence and Bliss’ beguiles with rippling piano chords and plaintive woodwind melodies that echo the language of 19th century romantic composers; they return in varied form to bridge each section into the next. For ‘Giants,’ Forbes drew on his research into traditional Yoruba music to create the complex rhythmic patterns that drive the ensemble’s interplay to dizzying heights of intensity. “’Giants’ is about mythical beings: the giants of our music, and the challenge of overcoming something big when the odds can be stacked against you. So, we’ve all got giants who inspire, and giants to contend with.” At the album’s core, the three-part ‘Like Lambs’ segment develops outwards from the hushed chamber-music tonalities of rich-voiced arco bass and cascades of piano to create, by turns, haunting and dreamy atmospheres in ‘Like Lambs: Ignorance and innocence’. In the second movement, ‘Like Lambs: To The Slaughter,’ the rhythmic intensity builds relentlessly through burning improvisations from David Preston and Ivo Neame. In the deeply affecting concluding section ‘Like Lambs: To Our Own Demise,’ Nathaniel Facey and Forbes create a searingly sorrowful dialog drawn from the deepest free-jazz wells. “It’s about my feelings that we are not paying enough attention to the pain and suffering that many people are experiencing,” Forbes explains. Segueing into ‘The Garden of Beginnings: Earth,’ the quintet recapitulates the thematic piano scales of the album opener which, like raindrops, wash away the dissonance and unrest of ‘Like Lambs,’ soon settling into a grounded tranquillity of gentle balladic nature.
‘Drogon,’ a composition contributed by Facey, displays his typical wit and attention to detail in a piece of musical pyrotechnics that shows off the collective strength as improvisers at the highest level. Finally, ‘The Garden of Beginnings: Divine Revelation’ reprises the recurring motif, moving from a passionate Coltrane-like rubato into a slow, stately ballad feeling, with chords dropped one by one into the surrounding silence, ending on a resolution of calm optimism. Each movement has its own powerful character, but moves irresistibly into the next, commanding our full involvement as a listener, presenting a deliberate challenge for our fractured attention spans to engage and immerse ourselves in the flow. By sustaining its musical contemplation across an unbroken arc, the album’s musical format itself is a statement about the value of perseverance, common purpose and holding on to faith. Undoubtedly, Like Lambs: To The Slaughter marks a decisive moment in Empirical’s ongoing evolution.