Toby Martin - I Felt The Valley Lifting (2021)

Ivy League Records are excited to announce that Toby Martin’s third solo album, I Felt The Valley Lifting. Written while living with his young family in Slaithwaite -- a post-industrial village in northern England -- and made in collaboration with local folk, rock and Persian musicians, the frontman and songwriter for Sydney band Youth Group draws from his newfound love of British Isles folk music and merges it with the kind of fuzzed-out, off-kilter indie rock that obsessed him in his youth.

To celebrate the announce, Martin has dropped the first single, ‘Linthwaite Houdini’, heavily inspired by British Isles folk music and local lore. “My friend Arthur told me the story of the Linthwaite Houdini one night as we walked across the moors to the pub,” Martin explains. “He told me about the man who buried himself alive at the village fete and how it all went horribly wrong. ‘When did this happen?’ said I. ‘The 18th century?’ ‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘2015.’