Scottish quartet Modern Studies unite pastoral chamber pop and folk with a subtly experimental spirit. Blending lush vocal harmonies, kosmische-tinged rhythms and intricate arrangements, the band have released four critically-acclaimed LPs and two EPs since 2016.

Modern Studies formed in 2015 around the songwriting of Glasgow-based musician Emily Scott, joined by Rob St John, Joe Smillie and Pete Harvey.

‘Swell to Great’ (2016) was released on Scottish micro-indie label Song, By Toad, making MOJO Magazine’s Top 20 year-end list and the long-list of the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) awards. Fire Records reissued ‘Swell to Great’ a year later.

‘Welcome Strangers’ (2018) is an expansive, orchestral album part funded by Creative Scotland, was released by Fire to widespread critical praise. The band toured the UK, played Glastonbury and Celtic Connections, produced an orchestral audio-visual show at the Edinburgh Fringe, and hosted experimental workshop series Spectral Verses in this year. Artist and sound designer Tommy Perman then crafted ‘Emergent Slow Arcs’, a ghostly multi-media re-interpretation of ‘Welcome Strangers’, which was issued by Fire in 2019.

‘The Weight of the Sun’ (2020) was described by Record Collector as “their best album yet”, and it featured as Rough Trade Album of the Month, and Norman Records Album of the Week. Glowing international praise included The Vinyl District (USA), Il Manifesto (Italy), Stern (Germany), Full Moon (Czechia), Expresso (Portugal), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Germany) and more.

‘We Are There’ (2022) saw a great deal more solid gold press and international radio play. The band toured the UK as a 3 piece in December, including a Fire showcase at the Art Deco Rio cinema in London. An experimental EP, Cassandra, based on the Greek myth, and written and recorded in an intensive week in a barn, was also released on cassette in this year, as an exploratory foray into experimental ways of working.

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“Emily Scott’s voice is а beautiful thing. It flies like Sandy Denny, but it has the wounded intimacy of Beth Gibbons and the precision of Christine McVie too” ★★★★ MOJO (We are There)

“Sweeping strings flower into chamber pop harmonies centred around Emily Scott’s rich vocal seam. Voicing poetry in words and musical motion, notion and notation… cinematic and dream-like” ★★★★1/2 NARC (We Are There)

“Emily Scott and Rob St John. The former is cool, clear and unsentimental, with echoes of the some of the great English stylists, from Sandy Denny to Jacqui McShee. The latter is rich and deep, near-gothic. Working in tandem, singing over and under each other, the effect is of a stiff, freshening breeze blowing through the embers of a good, strong fire” ★★★★ UNCUT (We Are There)

“There’s a charm within Modern Studies’ DNA which makes them, without fanfare or clamour, one of today’s most mesmerising outfits.” Prog (The Weight of the Sun)

“Sensitive, smart, inventive, cultured, brimming with complex ideas.” ★★★★ Record Collector (The Weight of the Sun)

“Old and new, sweet and sharp, Welcome Strangers holds you in an ambiguous, but utterly enchanting, embrace… songs that suggest a muddy-hemmed Jim O’Rourke lost in a field in rural Perthshire.” ★★★★ MOJO (Welcome Strangers)

“Melancholic magic… recalls Johnny Marr’s hazier reveries and the febrile, electrified folk of Polly Harvey’s Let England Shake.” 8/10 UNCUT (Welcome Strangers)

“Sit up and take note; Modern Studies are setting the standards for intelligent pop in 2018.” ★★★★ Record Collector (Welcome Strangers)

“A fantastic collection of woozy, lovely songs” – The Guardian (Welcome Strangers)

“This excellent second album, all subtly energetic rhythms, and just-so flourishes of brass and strings, a very contemporary-feeling blend of Scottish-hued indie, jazz, folk, tropicalia – you name it… sounding like two itinerant folk singers picked up from the side of the road and whisked off down the tidy motorways of an imagined future Britain” The Quietus, Albums of the Month (Welcome Strangers)

“Modern Studies have created something that feels as abstract as it does accessible, as complex as it is beautifully simple.” ★★★★ The Skinny (Welcome Strangers)

“Sublime… your brain, ticker and feet are moved.” Prog (Welcome Strangers)

“there is a calmness in its melancholy, a beauty in its blues. These are songs that see the mystical beyond the material, abstracted folk ballads awash in memory.” ★★★★ MOJO (Swell to Great)

“a gorgeous sound which lands somewhere between Belle & Sebastian at their most icily wistful, and Fairport Convention’s autumnal folk-rock.” The List (Swell to Great)