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The Fink story used to go like this: Fin Greenall started as a DJ, wrote songs with Amy Winehouse, ended up as the first singer-songwriter signed to the legendary electronic label Ninja Tune, and went onto become the second-highest-selling artist from Cornwall. But these days that version buries the lede.   

 

These days – on the new, ninth Fink album – Greenall is operating within a lineage of authentic, quietly revolutionary artists from England’s verdant southwestern toe. Artists like Michael Chapman.  

 

In 1970, the elusive acoustic guitar wizard released an album called Fully Qualified Survivor. The cult-classic served as a lodestar for Greenall – along with bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker – as he began jigsawing together The City Is Coming to Erase it All, the follow-up to 2024’s Beauty In Your Wake. He even considered covering a song from it, but in the process, inadvertently stumbled into what became the album’s opener. 

 

‘Wishing For Blue Sky’ circles a universal teenage ache: waiting for life to start. “No point dying of patience” goes the first lyric as crunching footsteps cue a resonant, open-tuned acoustic swaying into view. By 18, Greenall was fed up with waiting, so he left suburban Bristol and saw the world, sending postcards from the edge, waiting tables, squirreling away tips for the next flight. Thornton had similar experiences when the guitarist/drummer busked across Europe.  

 

This is nowstalgia more than nostalgia, though; there’s a parallel between these 18-year-olds and Fink’s autumn-aged family men. “You’re expected to be boring and settling down at this age,” Thornton says. “But we’ve still got this tremendous wanderlust. We want to go and discover, and also achieve things.” 

 

Fink’s love of touring is part compulsion. They’ve played every major venue in every major European city eight-or-more times. They’ll traverse Europe, probing every corner of the live circuit, “just because we want to – we don’t want to forget that Marseille exists, Montpellier exists,” Greenall says. They love every aspect: from driving their home-on-wheels to those inimitable moments of musical kismet that spark onstage. But “there’s also something about the need to spread the word,” Greenall says. “The need to play your new material is so overwhelming that it trumps all the comforts and trinkets.” 

 

When you commit to blurring your passion with your work, it’s easy to feel stuck on a hamster-wheel. That’s the central theme of the album: the city’s ominous encroachment. On one hand, it’s about life’s abstract concerns leaking into the frame, interrupting your art, interrupting reality as you experience it when removed from the daily rat race. On the other, it’s about the fragile tranquillity of Greenall’s native Cornwall: “the city is surely going to come and roll over this.”  

 

Recording in Zennor for the second time – unfinished business, Greenall says – they went full Cornwall. Pasties for lunch. Reading The Plumed Serpent by famous Zennor resident D. H. Lawrence. “We discovered quickly that my vocals were super nice after I’d done a morning swim, put on the fire, got the song ready,” Greenall says. “Maybe after lunch they were a bit off, because I was thinking too much. Life was encroaching a little.” They wanted to make City like Chapman would have, even down to which guitar strings they used – something Grammy-winning producer Sam Okell was a great advisor on. “If it didn’t exist in 1974, you’re not allowed to use it.”  

 

Simultaneously, they were energised by a current crop of indie-folk artists rejecting the urgency of urban life. Adrianne Lenker isolated in the foothills of Western Massachusetts’ mountains while crafting songs and instrumentals. Loma left Texas for a stone house on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, writing about nature’s formidability. Florist is another biggie for Greenall, and Flyte has a way of soundtracking whatever he’s doing.  

 

“I’m not looking for retro photocopies, because I’ve got Michael Chapman albums, Joni Mitchell albums,” Greenall explains. “I want something new, but it has the vibe or the ethos.” That goes for others’ music, but his, too: he’s all about the era of the song – “when the song was king and a good song could change everything.”  

 

City contributes to its renaissance. ‘Two Magpies’ is a gorgeous, softly fingerpicked ode for Greenall’s daughter, but it’s nuanced: “The stillness makes us panic just a little at first,” he murmurs, admitting to an initial cold-plunge shock that arises when you extricate yourself from the city. He tucks the line between small, blissful observations of buttercups and birds, subverting the dream-perfect scene with an experience any city-dweller could relate to.  

 

With ‘Does the Shade Choose Who to Comfort?’, they’re more settled in, getting their hands dirty. It’s a visceral song – “swampy, mulchy, and organic, like you can smell the peat and the earth.” They enlisted Charlie Schnurr for its intro – the album’s “only Americana moment” – giving the violinist a “nonsense brief” of Irish but not; classical but modern. Greenall thinks her stoic overture sends listeners to the Midwestern plains, but it could easily be Zennor’s rolling pastures. Schnurr ended up playing across the album.  

 

Photographer Paolo Zambaldi visited Cornwall, too. Though they planned to use digital shots, the grainy analogues snapped for Zambaldi’s own collection were perfect for the album’s lost-in-time identity. Greenall graces the cover of several Fink albums – going back to 2006’s beloved Biscuits For Breakfast – but while this cover features him, it isn’t about him. Laying in a prickly gorse – shredding his back in the process – he submits to the Cornish landscape. It almost starts erasing him.  

 

Greenall lives in Berlin now. Thursday nights he’s relieved from parental duties. He’ll pull on a thick coat and brave the ice-sheet streets to his favourite record store, Vinyl-a-GoGo. He’s often the only guy in there, merrily browsing bountiful crates – “I want to learn more. I want to know, am I into Nigerian Highlife or Zambian beats?”  

 

City is a product of this hunger for discovery, and idolatry of the album as a form – like we had in 1974. City’s cover mirrors its interior, the first song is the greeting, the instrumental closer the conclusion. It’s a story. It’s a record for people who, like its creators, are curious. People who happily face a little cold for music, who light a crackling fire back home, who sit with these songs until they’re ready to chase after their own blue sky.