On the Rise
Josephine Illingworth

Josephine Illingworth has. She did so every night for a week while Cheryl-Strayed-ing the Golden Valley Pilgrim Way, a 80km hiking route that loops from Hereford Cathedral. Sleeping in churches – ‘night sanctuaries’, they’re nicknamed – is the done thing for pilgrims. The vicars leave out tea and biscuits and campbeds. Hikers unfurl sleeping bags and enjoy insulation from the elements after a long day of snaking past crumbling castles and holy wells. 

Her final day on the trail, Illingworth risked wading through a flooded valley. She was picked up on the other side, soaked to the skin, by an indignant local. “He was like, ‘What the hell are you doing? Let me drive you to your church,’” she remembers. “As we were driving, this kestrel came out of nowhere and floated in front of the van the whole way. I was like, okay, this feels quite special. Moments like that made it into the songs.”

Illingworth’s songs aren’t so much songs as immersive found-sound patchworks held together by cavernous acoustics and choral calls that echo through valleys as they spin wondrous folkloric stories. You’ve probably stumbled across them in the requisite Lost In The Woods Spotify mix or its equivalent, her work typically shelved as go-to-the-mountains-core. But there’s much more going on here than pretty acoustic guitar + lyrics about lakes, much more than the algorithm can understand and box in. Illingworth is a hang-on-every-word kinda vocalist, a restless creative whose release schedule can barely keep up with her interdisciplinary ideas as she produces accompanying photo diaries, visual art, and even a novella. 

Back in Wales, Illingworth and driver find the church, but it’s locked. She wanders over to the local pub, where it so happens that a local folk group’s weekly rehearsal is underway. She has her guitar on her back; they ask her to join. “I spent the evening playing with them,” she says. Between the kindness of an exasperated stranger, the lodestar kestrel, and the impromptu pub jam, “it just felt like symbol against symbol against sign against story, all coming together,” she says. Maybe this is the sort of magic that the universe deals out once you make the effort to slow down and get outside? “I think it’s like a frame of mind as well,” Illingworth says, “making up patterns and trying to see things – it’s a nice way to live.”

Hiking, she ponders, forces us to unlearn the anxious thought rhythms that contemporary society drums up. “Your worries turn from this meta swirl of emails and things to, okay, where am I sleeping tonight? What am I eating? Just a self affirming experience. You can think so clearly. This is why I love hiking, because the overthinking part of your brain is attuned to where you’re stepping. It opens up this whole creative thing and the sky’s the limit.”

Nature has always been Illingworth’s cowriter. A few months back, she released Singing the Mountain. When I bring it up, she takes a minute to realise what I’m on about. Turns out, it wasn’t really a thing. She quietly stuck the five-track project up on Bandcamp, having put it together a while back. That’s how prolific she is: a work of art that most people could never make is Illingworth’s under-the-radar stop-gap. That project was a tribute to the Dolomites. She spent a few weeks hiking. She slept in bivaccos – small mountain shelters free for hikers to use – and brought home the sounds of the mountain and messages left in the bivaccos’ guest books, turning them into lyrics. 

“I like recording sounds where it doesn’t seem like there’s sound there – finding it in the silence,” she says. “The mountains are good for that. You get these quiet echoes of bells coming up through the valley. Or I’ve got a recorder that you can turn the gain up really high. I was sitting on the coast, listening to the sounds of huge oil tankers going past, which you can’t hear, but when you turn it up it was this techno bass sound.” She burrows them into her music, sometimes to bookend a song. Mostly they go unnoticed, snuggling around her vocalizations and resonant acoustics like the imperceptible direction-change of leaves brushed by a light breeze. 

When I admit that I’ve been going around collecting birdsong and snatches of conversation, and feeling a bit voyeuristic about it, she reassures me that sounds are universal property. And it’s not even what you do with them so much as the act of capturing them, because it changes the way you think about everything, the way you meet the world. Her love for making field recordings started in Istanbul. She went to collect the sounds of the Syrian refugee population and how they interfaced with the city. One day, a modern Turkish pop song emanating from a bodega coalesced with a call to prayer outside. She was inspired by the striking harmonic shift.  

Illingworth has historically leant into sound art over more conventional songwriting. She’s done several artist residencies, but changed tact when an old musicology pal from university got in touch about one of her end-of-year projects he rediscovered on his laptop. He suggested they rearrange the piece of music and release it. 

“Silent Earth” blew up, cracking 20 million streams. She signed to Warner. People got her lyrics tattooed. They said things like “this is what I imagine heaven feels like,” and “this sounds like waking up early at scout camp and quietly sneaking out of the cabin to stand barefoot on the wet grass, look out into the woods and listen to the birds.” Both fans are correct. It’s a shockingly beautiful song, one that takes you back to an age when you were just present, unaware of the what’s-next or the wider world. A song you can’t describe without superlatives and metaphors, a once-every-couple-of-years find. 

“Maybe there was a part of me that’d been trying to be a bit arty and unconventional and keeping myself tied in this sound art world where you couldn’t show too much,” she says, but “Silent Earth” changed everything. “As soon as I wrote songs, it was just like, phooo, okay, this is actually what I want to write.” Signing to the don of major labels was overwhelming, though, relegating her to the newest, smallest fish in an unruly pond. “It never felt right, to be honest. I completely lost my sense of self and was just going through the motions. I didn’t write songs for eight months because all I was thinking about and doing was meetings and numbers and streams.”

She left the label after her 2025 EP The Roaming, bungeeing to a totally independent approach that allowed her to prioritise creating above the always-hungry industry. “It feels a lot more real now,” she says. “I’m trying to be separate with the two sides of it, because I don’t think anything really genuine can come from that industry mindset, for me.” 

This brings us to Bright Things I Found In The Dark, a seven-song EP that arrives tomorrow. After rushing out The Roaming because of her initial momentum, and after not-really-releasing Singing the Mountain – this EP comes from a more intentional place. It follows a conceptual arc: a girl who runs away and is guided by a wolf mother into the wild, into nature – the only place she can feel unobserved. “It’s definitely in a place, but it’s a fantasy place, a made-up place,” she explains of its contrast to the Dolomites project. “I’ve always taken sounds from a real place and tried to show that place; my thinking was I want to bring nature to people and raise awareness or make nature feel part of daily life. For this one I was like, okay, I’m gonna create something that’s completely made up. Because I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about folklore and how, in modern life, we’ve lost so much of that, lost a lot of colour, lost a lot of stories. I wanted to create my own folklore that people can listen to and be part of.”

One throughline, she says – an inadvertent one that she noticed after the fact – is feminism. The concept of this EP builds on her favourite song she’s ever written, “Black Rabbit”, from The Roaming. That one tells “the story of a girl who’s sexually abused and she runs away and turns into a rabbit and becomes part of nature in her wildness,” Illingworth tells me. This EP follows a runaway, too, a young girl who leaves home. “She’s raised by a female wolf who is like a mother figure and takes her through this sadness and pulls her out into the wild. At the end of the story she turns into everything, which is the idea. She becomes a deity figure and is no longer one thing. She’s the mountain. It’s a story built off of my own experiences as a woman and feeling I can be most free and most myself when I can be outside in nature.”

Illingworth is troubled by our view of the natural world as something to be conquered, subordinate – or even separate – from ourselves. “It’s very much alive and it’s something with agency,” she cautions. “We shouldn’t see it as this dead thing we can control. It’s the opposite. That’s what I take from those experiences. That’s what the music’s trying to say.” The ‘mother’ mentioned across the EP isn’t that run-of-the-mill idea of a benevolent mother nature. This mother is more: “the wolf and the mountain, nature as a nurturing space. Not just a nurturing space but an angry and a wild space and a strange and a dark space, but a space where you can really be every echelon of yourself – unobserved,” Illingworth explains. 

The EP’s narrative changes course with “The Border”, track 5. It’s when the depressed, cloistered protagonist “wakes up and realises that she’s in this place and it’s so real and vital and natural,” Illingworth says. “And she runs away. That song is the crux of the whole EP. It’s an important song.” It sounds like the literal call of the wild, ebullient and majestic with soaring backing vocals and the far-off storm of cymbals and timpanis. Her trembling, half-crying whisper at the end, after the droning acoustic symphony slips away to leave one dutiful guitar companion, is devastating in the best way, the words hovering like a kestrel over a van as her lips pinch at the snow and pine trees and a falling feather. 

Illingworth constructs these vast soundscapes, distills these vast landscapes, in such an intimate, humdrum space: a garden shed. The dichotomy speaks to this idea of embracing the everythingness of the wild and it, in turn, shrinking your world. As though uniting yourself with nature enables you, a small, insignificant courier, to carry all of its freedom and possibility within you, wherever you are. 

“I’ll look around, out the window into the woods, and be like, okay, I want to make a texture or a world that this song is in,” she tells me of her first step in the process. From there, she doesn’t delete her workings-out, the half-there takes, but leaves many of them twittering quietly in the mix. You can’t identify specifics but they bolster the overall life and energy of each piece. She’ll play a D chord in four different octaves. Every member of her family will mutter the word ‘hail’. Is that rain or a rushing river? Neither – it’s water shooting out of a stone carving of a head at St Peter’s Holy Well. Those aren’t actually wolves; they’re pitched-down chickens. Those sound like whales. Well, they’re distorted sparrows. 

The world of each song, like nature, brims with detail and secrets and half-knowns. She wants to plant the biggest secret garden she can, for the people who want to explore more deeply, to lose themselves and rediscover something, everything. That goes for the songs themselves but the extended folkloric world that accompanies the EP, too. “I really want it to be a world and the songs are a gateway into that,” she says. The songs are just the beginning. When it comes to Josephine Illingworth and the wild world she translates, the longer you look, the more you see. The closer you come to being free.