BY any measure, 15 years is a lengthy gestation period for an album but Una Baines’perseverance as a band leader hasgrew from a dream she had about former band The Fall, while “Hel” plays to her “obsession with the sound of the wind, its wildness and my love for that very thing that cannot be tamed. Lyrically, the end was inspired in part by [German artist] Käthe Kollwitz’s sketches of death. Hel is the [mythological Norse] goddess of death, a great contrast to the Christian Hell, which is a place of eternal torture. I began to consider Hel a compassionate and loving entity.” If Poppycock’s journey has been a fitful and slightly fraught one, Baines seems unbothered: “This was something I started without having any idea where it would take me.”
