*Edition of 300 in hand painted cover, each copy comes with a different artwork* The album Hamewith by A Happy Return unfolds as a tender suite of miniature impressions, each song hovering between memory and awakening. Emerging through Spillage Fete, a label known for its dedication to the handcrafted and the unhurried, the record draws its title from the Scots word meaning “homewards.” The sentiment is apt: Hamewith traces a quiet pilgrimage toward the places—real or imagined—where one’s inner weather settles. Across its 16 tracks, running scarcely over half an hour, the record assembles a world of attuned noticing: the turn of a season, the shimmer of breath, the fragile peace between day and dark.​ Self-recorded in domestic spaces and rural corners, Hamewith grows out of textures that feel almost accidental—a door creaking, a barely tuned guitar, faint birdsong caught between takes. Yet this intimacy is deliberate; the artist’s ear is attuned to the ephemeral. Tracks like “Light I Learn” and “Way Station” drift by in under two minutes, recalling the fragmentary storytelling of Vashti Bunyan or the spectral melodicism of early Bibio. “Knotted” and “Umbel” weave fingerpicked guitar with tape warble and soft loops of voice, the imperfections becoming part of the emotional fabric. Each miniature feels self-contained yet porous, letting the listener complete its shape through memory and association.​

Though modest in scope, Hamewith carries a sense of wholeness that makes its brevity deceptive. Sequenced as a continuous arc, it moves through warmth and melancholy without insisting on resolution. Its pastoral sensibility—flecked with traces of British folk and ambient tape collage—anchors it in both geography and inner reflection. One hears the echo of cottage recordings, of artists working quietly at the edge of audibility, trusting in resonance rather than display. The closing title track, “Hamewith,” distills that ethos perfectly: an unadorned melody collapsing into analogue hiss, suggesting both retreat and return at once.​ Hamewith is less an album to be analyzed than inhabited. It invites slow listening, the kind that allows ordinary sounds to bloom into significance. A Happy Return approaches music as correspondence—with land, memory, and the imperfections of tape itself. In a moment when so much demands polish and precision, Hamewith offers something more fragile and rare: a reminder that home is not a fixed place, but a recurring note that finds its way back in fragments, hesitations, and small acts of care.