Announcing: the debut album from Lichen

We’re back from an incredible weekend in Dorset at End of the Road Festival, and as summer begins to fade we bring news that we hope will offer warmth.

Today we announce the upcoming release of  In My Dreams You Were Golden, the debut album from Lichen, and the album’s first single The Sentence Grows which is available to stream everywhere now.

The album, hailed by acclaimed director Shane Meadows as “a record with the rare ability to both lift and levy the heart” will be released on Joy of Life International on November 7th on standard black and deluxe orange and red marble vinyl.

PRESAVE and PREORDER now!

Press photo credits: Kitty Handley.

Lichen is the recording project of South London-based songwriter Michael Clark (a dear friend, collaborator and long-time member of The Golden Dregs). Languid on the surface yet masterfully structured beneath, Lichen’s music balances delicate textures with emotional weight. There’s a heady marriage between this cultivated formal control and the intensity of Clark’s lyrical world — one that has evolved quietly but deliberately over the past decade.

Clark’s earliest recordings began appearing online in 2014: self-recorded, self-released songs that caught the ears of his peers and slowly built a following. The Line of Best Fit described his early work as “a veritable treasure trove of undiscovered sad bastard alternative.” His debut EP, Something To Be Won (2019), marked a formal arrival: four sparse, poetic songs full of lyrical candour and ghostly precision, praised by God Is In The TV as “a swirling and atmospherically tender set… poignant and heavy in content, but shimmering.

Since then, Clark has expanded his palette both musically and collaboratively. A string of standalone singles — including Winter Song, Talking to Nobody, Never Felt the Morning Sun saw Lichen evolve from an insular project into something more collective, without ever losing its intimacy. Carefully arranged strings, keys, guitars and percussion create space around Clark’s voice, enriching the sense of stillness and lyrical precision at the core of each track.

This evolution of Lichen culminates in In My Dreams You Were Golden, Lichen’s debut full-length album. Produced by Ted Barnes (Beth Orton, Clayhill) and mixed and mastered by Sean Read (Edwyn Collins, Dexys, Soulsavers), the record brings together a full ensemble to deliver Clark’s most expansive and emotionally complex work to date. Across ten tracks, he explores death, memory, and spiritual survival through elemental imagery — bones, water, stone, fire — all filtered through a dreamlike sense of displacement and grace. It is this that has captured the imagination of acclaimed director Shane Meadows who placed album track Light on the Firing Line in a powerful closing sequence in his 2023 BBC series The Gallows Pole. Meadows describes the record as “a soul bearing tightrope of melodious malady and a voice that tiptoes exquisitely between the two”.

Taken as one, Lichen’s work offers a meditation on the lines between the past, the present, and the eternal that persist within the landscape of the everyday. There’s no posturing, just quietly devastating songs drawn with patience and performed with care.

PRESAVE and PREORDER now. You’re really going to love this one.

j o l i

 Artwork credit: Leah Jensen

TRACKLISTING

1. Feigning Life

2. The Sentence Grows

3. In My Dreams You Were Golden

4. Resurrection

5. Light on the Firing Line

6. Standing Tall

7. Climbing The Walls

8. Said And Down

9. Refusing Heaven

10. A Drop in the Ocean
    

LICHEN ONLINE

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