The Sirens - SHOLTO

'The Sirens' is SHOLTO’s most emotionally ambitious record yet—a rich, dreamlike dive into desire, doubt, and duality. Drawing on ancient myths and personal turbulence, the album drifts between beauty and danger, temptation and restraint. It’s a record full of shimmering textures, haunted spaces, and tender confrontations with the self.

Where SHOLTO’s earlier work often floated in the ambient and ethereal, 'The Sirens' feels more grounded, still beautiful, but shadowed, with more weight and tension. Each track moves like a tide, pushing and pulling between clarity and confusion, control and surrender. Strings, harp, jazz drums, and soft electronics melt together in songs that feel more like short films than traditional compositions.

It opens with 'Smooth Sailing' (ft. Phoebe Coco), a track that drifts like a half-remembered dream. It’s gentle on the surface, but carries emotional depth beneath, about how even ease can be uneasy, and how stillness doesn’t always mean peace. That central lyric, “today the clouds looked like mountains, why don’t we climb them?” captures the record’s tone: curious, searching, quietly aching.

Next comes 'Persephone’s Perception', a myth retold from the inside out. Here, Persephone isn’t dragged into darkness—she chooses it. A steady groove and euphoric string breaks carry the track forward, weaving between light and shadow. It’s bold, meditative, and full of movement, both musically and emotionally.

'Tied To the Mast' is the album’s most intense moment; a stormy, glitch-laced epic inspired by Odysseus resisting the call of the sirens. It starts ghostly and fractured, then drops into a heavy groove before dissolving into a sparse, drifting coda. The storm hits hard, then leaves you in the quiet aftermath.

In contrast, 'Ghibli’s Dream' is the album’s lightest, most joyful offering. Warm and nostalgic, it was inspired by the surreal tenderness of Studio Ghibli films, and a cat SHOLTO used to hang out with. It’s playful and glowing, a moment of surrender to joy before the shadows return. As the album’s focus track, it captures the sweetness that lives right on the edge of something more complicated.

Elsewhere, tracks like 'El Faro' and 'Purple Flow' act as warnings; gentle, fog-drenched, but loaded with tension. 'Temptress' is slow, smoky, and intimate, while 'Swampland of the Soul' takes a deeper dive into the emotional spaces we often avoid—grief, uncertainty, inner murk.

It all lands with 'Invisible Conductor of the Orchestra (Come With Me)', a quiet, poetic finale featuring Lea Petges. It’s part lullaby, part invitation, part trap. The question is: Do you follow? It doesn’t resolve the journey, but it does distil it.

Recorded between SFJ Studios and Total Refreshment Centre, 'The Sirens' was written, produced, and largely performed by SHOLTO, with contributions from long-time collaborators including Phoebe Coco, Thomas McBrien, Syd Kemp, and Rachel Kitchlew. The result is a tactile, immersive world built on strings, synths, silence, and emotion.

This isn’t a record that wraps things up neatly. 'The Sirens' leaves things open, hovering somewhere between seduction and surrender, between myth and memory. It’s a love letter to the parts of ourselves we don’t always want to look at, but probably should.