The UK has a long tradition of storytellers regaling others with tales of eldritch horror. Manchester trio and recent AnalogueTrash signings Flange Circus take us on a journey into a world of Witchfinder Generals, Shellyan monsters, Grindylows, and werewolf-infested moors on new single It’s a Tree.

Like the plot of a 1960s classic Hammer horror distilled down to less than five minutes of musical and atmospheric tension, It’s a Tree’s enthralling tones transmogrify second by second, taking the listener on a harum-scarum ride into primeval woods and the unknown entities that lie within.

Fans of Joy Division, Tangerine Dream, Neu, Teeth of the Sea, John Carpenter, The Advisory Circle, and the Ghost Box Records roster will find the music of Flange Circus of particular interest, as the band find inspiration in similar sonic palettes and powerful musical motifs.

Though the track is largely instrumental, there’s a story to It’s a Tree that will send shivers down your spine. It’s perfect for the month of October, as Halloween beckons us to the point where this world and the next are but a whisper, curse, or spell away from one another.

The band gives this background to the unspoken words that live within It’s a Tree.

“Forests, woodlands, and copses. A place of sanctuary, calm and serenity? Or a place of hidden danger, brooding malevolence, and half-glimpsed shapes?

“Our new single It’s a Tree sees us tread the arboreal landscape and find ourselves unnervingly suspended between feelings of beauty and majesty, and a creeping dread of what moves through and haunts these leafy worlds.

“What waits for us in the forest? Is it just a tree? Do trees have eyes? How and in what way are we being watched, if at all? These questions inspire the single.

“The splendour of trees gathered informs the opening riff of the track. Sounding like a synth line, but in reality, an effected guitar, this intro branches out to pounding drums and a bass groove for the grove.

“Then, as the grandeur of soaring synths and driving rhythms give way to a clearing where all seems calmer and safe, we sense the lurking menace behind the branches, the tree trunks and crawling through the roots, and we feel suddenly exposed and vulnerable.

“And then the chase is on. Whom or what is chasing? An imaginative figment or the manifestation of a repressed primordial memory? Something tangibly carnivorous? Or something wishing us to join it or them, to become part of the cycle of growth and mulch, spawning and decay?

“It’s a Tree is a track about the ambiguity of the forest, the trees, and the denizens that lurk therein. It charts the ambivalence of such spaces, the unhomely mix of desire and repulsion that both draws the heart and sends you running scared.”

It’s a Tree is a taster for the band’s upcoming Katabasis album, which is due for release early 2023.