"As people, as humans, we need that connection"

In 2018, John Doran, Luke Turner and Noel Gardner of the Quietus started talking about "New Weird Britain". For Doran and Gardner, the term referred principally to the fertile underground music scene, but for Turner it was also connected to landscape and place, with musicians among those artists engaged in "re-examining our relationship to the non-urban".

Five years on, and New Weird Britain seems to be everywhere: music, of course (I'm thinking of the likes of Richard Dawson, Gazelle Twin and Alison Cotton), but also art, literature, TV (Shane Meadows' recent adaptation of Ben Myers' novel The Gallows Pole), film (the likes of Men, Enys Men and new release Inland, all alluding to the folk horror tradition with The Wicker Man as a touchstone) and culture more widely. According to Weird Walk, a self-described "journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles" that seems to have become the movement's bible, what we're witnessing is simply "a very British urge to unearth the uncanny within the bucolic".

As Thom Waite has reported in a fascinating article for Dazed, it's also bound up with Paganism, which appears to be on the rise. A curious development in our scientifically enlightened times? Not so, he suggests. As "a decentralised religion based on loose communities and diverse individual practices, instead of dogmatic texts and monolithic institutions", could Paganism in fact be "the perfect belief system for the internet age?"

Other catalysing factors are at play too: the spiritual vacuum created by the declining power and authority of organised religion, increasing sensitivity to the climate crisis and our catastrophic impact on (and dissociation from) the natural world, the profound dissatisfaction and alienation that arises from life under capitalism.

This last factor circles back to Doran's point about the New Weird Britain artists, who through their fierce DIY ethic, idiosyncratic approach and self-determination express "a militant rage against the late capitalist machine". For Waite's interviewee Maria Perez Cuervo of Hellebore, the revival of Paganism isn't a quaint hippyish fetishising of the ancient past but (rather like the DIY underground) an attempt to think beyond capitalism to an alternative future.