boycalledcrow

Welcome to "the sprawl."

"the sprawl" is the latest album from boycalledcrow, the alias of Chester’s Carl M. Knott. Where his previous record for Mortality Tables, Kullu, reached deep into his personal history as he trekked across India, the subject matter of "the sprawl" follows Knott as he disappears down a wormhole of obsession: long evening walks in a search for strange phenomena in the night sky, hours spent poring over declassified US government UFO files, days lost reading about alien species.

The album finds Knott exploring the most psychedelic fringes of his music. Mostly gone are the folk-inspired motifs that characterised his earlier work; where they remain, these signature moments are suppressed beneath clouds of dense and undulating textures, grubby effects, heavy, broken hip-hop beats and dubby bass lines. Though Knott’s delicate guitar playing can still be heard across the album, it is at its most fractured, atomised into disorienting fragments.

These wild sonic excursions are exemplified by the distorted sounds vying with crisp beats on "zephyr," or the resolute dub banger "dreamwave." As a whole, it presents boycalledcrow’s unique and ever-changing sound world as sprawling, elusive and impossible-to-pin-down.

In spite of the subject matter that Knott was obsessed with during its creation, altogether more human events occupy the emotional core of the album. While he was making these pieces, his grandmother became ill and passed away. That raw, unprocessed grief dominates key tracks like "brittle bones" and "dead leaves." These are allegorical, shrouded moments that are characteristically emotional in the strange yet accessible way that has become a hallmark of Knott’s music.

"the sprawl" is, ultimately, an album caught between these two inseparable themes — of an overwhelming obsession with the unexplained and the pain and sorrow of a cherished loved one’s passing. It may be presented as a psychedelic trip, but it also weaves its singular way through Knott’s sprawling, fractured emotions.

The result is an album that messes freely with your head, hinting at things we scarcely want to ever confront — in the worlds beyond our own that sometimes spill out into ours, and in the unsettling feelings deep inside our minds that we need to set free.

Released on Mortality Tables · September 11th 2026 · Limited Edition Cassette & Digital
mortalitytables.bandcamp.com/album/the-sprawl

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