The South London six-piece’s highly anticipated three-part debut album, ‘The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain,’ sees a coming together of their carefully crafted, mystical piggy-fabled lore.

Tapir! have been very busy building their world. Inside this world, claymation models float down gushing rivers of egg yolk; bright red snouts, moulded in knobbled paper-mache, garb and shroud each musical storyteller; linen-clad dancers pirouette in shallow coastal waves; oil painted canvases, brazen and vivid, roll through sweeping mythical lands. Inside it, there are costumes, cardboard clouds and thunderbolts; an androgynous Jesus; interpretive dances to the cornet’s gentle honk.

It matters not whether these artefacts are curated with assiduous forethought, or come simply as spontaneous outpourings of unbridled creativity. Tapir!’s wondrously complex inner universe seems to grow more colourful every day, and its playful allure lies in the puzzle. In attempting to demystify each savoury morsel of this elaborate folklore that they scatter before our mortal feet.

‘The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain’ completes a musical project that exists in three distinct parts, the first two having been released already as sequential EPs via Heavenly Recordings. Travelling across land, sea, and now mountainous peaks, the narrative centres on a lone wanderer, simply named ‘The Pilgrim.’ We hear of his treacherous encounters along the way, which at times conflate earthly experiences with more fantastic ones. Unfolding like a mead-induced hallucination, Tapir!’s rustic alternative folk sound twinkles with warm, fireside fuzz, with lead vocalist Ike Gray’s sincere rasps cutting through the crackling embers like tales from a wise old friend.

Perhaps one of this album’s most charming attributes is the wide-eyed nostalgia that so frequently imbues it. Tucking you into its burlap sheets for a peaceful night of piggy-dreams, the sound recalls a safety akin to the worry-free spaces of childhood. Recurring use of the Elektron drum machine seats you by the toybox in a fairy-lit bedroom, the earthy thrums of acoustic guitars recall the winding notches of the tree barks that fill up the woodland nearby your house. Little Wings’ Kyle Field’s spoken narrations, which establish checkpoints at the start of each ‘Act’ further cement this nostalgic feeling, at times harking back to those formative storybook cassette tapes from the days of yore (aka the noughties). In this space that Tapir!’s music occupies, free from strife, the pure and simple story becomes sacred once again.

At its core, the well-crafted songs of ‘The Pilgrim…’ that house simple yet effective arrangements are what give it a powerful compositional foundation (further bolstered by production from Honeyglaze’s Yuri Shibuichi et al). While brimming with small structural surprises and variations, on the whole it maintains a lot of musical accessibility. As such, many of the melodies cast indelible prints in the brain. These can feel ripe for lighters-up audience belting along to tracks such as ‘Gymnopedie,’ or better suit crooning around the campfire in between sips of hot chocolate on songs such as ‘Untitled’ and ‘Eidolon’. Use of recurring patterns and repeating motifs underpins much of the record’s distinctive sound, and with a notably small palette of instrumentation, Tapir! carve out some humbly beautiful creations from the ground up. Arguably, the apex of such creations can be found on aptly named closing track ‘Mountain Song’, and the exhilarating wrench to the heartstrings fostered in the breakdown that sprawls across 5 glorious minutes. With repetitions that assemble like footsteps, it climbs in gradual dynamic notches, each instrument successively joining the triumphant march to ascension, until an anthemic chorus of voices explodes into the fore at dizzyingly high altitudes.

In many ways, Tapir! and their creations have become emblematic of the community spirit that fortifies the grassroots spaces of London’s thriving alternative music scene. The meat of this project was fleshed out in lockdown, but without the nurture and support of this community and, in particular, East London’s iconic George Tavern, it is unlikely that a project as creatively boundless and medium-transcending as ‘The Pilgrim…’ would have had the space to come so fully and spectacularly ino being as it has. The warmth of the Tapir! universe and the genuine love its fans have for it is yet another reminder of how precious these spaces and the dedicated people that occupy them continue to be to independent music today.

And so the concept album has found a home once again! Atop a green hill, carrying its sack into the Nether…