“Sometimes the most disturbing nightmares are the ones you don’t escape in your sleep, they’re the ones you wake up to every morning.”
Haunting Times is David Ell’s (scottish singer songwriter/composer) album of the subconscious. Released 31st October 2026 it’s a ten track album which uses the language of the dream state to explore a world that is increasingly fragmented, uncertain and hard to fathom. At its core is a very simple question: what is reality if the world we live in begins to seem strange and the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur? Ell takes a loose psychological journey through the album from dreaming and distortion into anxiety, confrontation and ultimately awakening. It’s an ambitious concept, but what really works is the way it translates the abstract into the very real. Childhood memories, isolation, identity, fear, vulnerability and resilience are all part of a wider meditation on the state of modern life. “The Quarry’s Calling” kicks things off, followed by “Signs “, with the central piece “Falling Down” bringing the album’s central concerns into focus. The song is built on the contrast between the innocence of a well known childhood nursery rhyme and the less innocent world of the adult. That contrast is a very effective conceptual basis for the piece: a thing associated with childhood innocence can be used as a way of exploring division, instability and human fragility. The message is equally important. No matter how separate people may believe themselves to be, the impact of what happens in the world will inevitably extend beyond individual boundaries. The accompanying film takes that idea and runs with it, using very familiar images of childhood and human experience which gradually become fragmented and surreal. It’s a powerful way of expressing the central tension of the album, in that something that is familiar can become deeply unsettling when viewed through a different lens. Rather than a retreat from reality, the dream state is used by Ell as a means of accessing reality and the film is a very effective demonstration of that.
Haunting Times is a potent mix of alternative rock, progressive rock, art rock, some very quiet acoustic songwriting and a fair bit of cinematic instrumental. It’s the product of Ell being both a songwriter and a composer and so you have the standard song forms opening out into much more atmospheric territory, with a very clear sense of narrative progression. The album has the benefit of the cinematic composer’s eye in terms of the emotional arc of the record, which allows the themes to develop in a way that isn’t just verse and chorus. The tracklisting is very much a journey through different forms of unease. “The Haunting” goes further into the psychological territory we’ve seen previously, “No Cure For This” is a much more intimate, acoustic and emotional counterpoint. “When The Bell Tolls” continues the journey and “Vampires” uses the figure of the vampire as a metaphor for faceless control. That’s a very interesting creative decision, to take a figure so universally associated with fear and use it as a metaphor for the faceless forces that can so easily break down and fracture a society. “Lionheart” then turns the focus onto the human condition, on vulnerability and on the capacity to endure. The album has a very different emotional character as it moves through the record, moving between the unsettling and the more personal. “The world may be falling apart around us, but the human spirit still has the power to resist, to rebuild and to rise.” That idea becomes more and more important as the record draws to a close. “Ignite My Soul” is an anthemic piece of resistance and brings a real sense of resolve into the more shadowy world of the album. Rather than just end on a note of darkness, Ell uses that darkness as a springboard for something more positive. There’s a real balance in the record which prevents it from being just a dark record. The darkness is matched by a very real interest in renewal and the record’s movement between the atmospheric, the acoustic and the guitar driven rock reflects that changing emotional journey. It’s an album whose music is very much in service to the narrative, with the cinematic elements adding real depth to a record which is just as much about the internal as it is about the external.
The final track “Ascension” is a quiet, atmospheric close to the album, a perfect conclusion to a journey that moves from nightmare to awakening. It’s a very appropriate ending for a record that spends so much of its time in the realm of questioning what we accept as reality, before slowly beginning to look at the prospect of seeing things differently. Ell’s approach to the idea of awakening is particularly interesting in that he doesn’t present it as some easy, automatic escape from the uncertainty of the world. The album suggests that to confront the world as it is, you have to first recognise the distortion. That’s where the resilience comes in. You have to be prepared to look at yourself and the world you’ve inherited with a degree of scrutiny. That’s a theme that’s been developed quite extensively on the previous album, *Welcome to the Ball*, which was all about identity and the different masks we wear in everyday life. That album was about the faces we put on for the world. This one takes that a stage further and looks at the world in which those identities are formed and challenged. It was recorded and mixed remotely and at Chamber Studio in Edinburgh and is Ell’s fourth studio album. It’s another step in the evolution of his very particular relationship between songwriting and cinematic composition. The ten tracks form a very coherent psychological landscape without ever reducing any of the ideas to a neat, simple answer. There’s a degree of openness to the piece which allows the listener to interpret the imagery through their own lived experience, whether that’s a connection with the childhood memories of “Falling Down”, the sense of vulnerability in “Lionheart” or the sense of determination in “Ignite My Soul”. In the end *Haunting Times* is a very thoughtful and atmospheric exploration of the unsettling nature of modern life and the potential for renewal. It’s a record that looks squarely at the nightmare of the modern world and refuses to be defeated by it. Its most important message is that even when the world is a nightmare, awakening is still possible.
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