Toria Wooff - Toria Wooff

English folk is about to enter a beguiling new era; tales of the beautifully strange.
Toria Wooff’s self-titled debut album offers an antidote to our demons; a contemporary twist on the Anglo folk which whisper a word to the wise; never judge a book by its cover.

“The self-reflection in the title demonstrates a life lived,” Toria tells. “The songs are chapters to dip in and out of, moments immortalised in time, bound together by nothing more than the human experience.” Like tales of the unexpected lingering in the dewy mist of the Lancashire moors surrounding her hometown, Toria Wooff is anything but linear. 

With each song written independently of the other, and yet, working together like a compendium of short stories in a well-thumbed cloth-bound novel, hope lies at its heart and buckles under emotional weight like the hefty influence of the gothic literature, ghost stories of English medieval scholar M.R. James, and the British Library’s Tales of the Weird adorning her bookshelves. The artwork even sees Toria herself, lounging across a church pew in the haunted 15th Century Medieval Mansion, Stanley Palace.

Both an exorcism of torment and an invitation to feeling the good, it offers a more palatable pill to swallow. Album opener ‘The Plough’ and imagined ghost story ‘The Waltz of Winter Hey’ explore the physical and metaphysical truth of womanhood, whilst love and commitment eeks through the cracks on reassuringly uplifting ‘That’s What Falling In Love Will Do.’ Elsewhere ‘Song for A’ and ‘Lefty’s Motel Room’ contend with the impact of death, lovingly reviving the spirit of her own MIA partner-in-crime, Alicia. “It's interesting that you can write with more than one meaning,” Toria reflects, “you can take the songs literally or they can mean something entirely different; with some, the truth didn’t occur to me until after they were written.”