Audiopile Review: Longtime readers of the weekly emails might recall us highlighting Manchester duo Celestial and their 2021 debut, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, an ethereal ambient-folk album that made subtle nods towards both Woo’s playful synth noodling and Durutti Column’s shimmering productions. If you were as bowled over as we were by that debut, you’ll be happy to hear that not much has changed for the duo. The rustic, home-fi recordings still give the feel of a long-lost private press unearthed by Smiling C, but there is an expansive depth to explore this time around, a little less of the lost-in-the forest meandering of that debut. The cyclical guitars, falling somewhere between melancholic John Fahey finger pickings and Vini Reilly running at 1/4 speed, are developed into a thicker, robust layering, while gingerly prodded synths elevate their folk-forward front towards the eye of a radiant kosmiche centre. The results are among the most sublime moments they’ve issued, at times playing like a slo-mo rendition of Boards of Canada’s americana-infused Campfire Headphase, or Wilson Tanner’s recent summer-y nostalgia effort. As bucolic as music gets. Edition of 300, sure not to last.

Ecstatic presents I Can Hear The Grass Grow, the transportive new album from Mancunian duo Celestial. Expanding on the bucolic dreamstates of their previous work, this latest release unfurls like dawn mist over dewy fields, steeped in fragile fingerpicking guitar aching with hushed intimacy.

Where Listen to the Sky traced the heavens, I Can Hear The Grass Grow sinks into the earth—its organic, fungal textures blossoming in layers of acoustic and electric guitar, droning harmoniums, and shimmering synth washes. The album’s hymnal atmosphere evokes a quiet devotion to the natural world, each track a meditation on unseen currents and lysergic reveries carried on the breeze, like the hum of insects at dusk or the slow stretch of ivy over stone.

Mermaid Boulevard pairs Celestial with labelmate Romance, weaving crystalline guitar figures through a haze of tape-worn ambience and gently pulsing electronics, like sunlight filtering through leaves. Song For The Rainy Season drifts in a slow-motion waltz of reverberant strings and plangent melodies, evoking the lull of wind through wild grass, while Skylark conjures a spectral chorus of layered harmonics and yearning guitar melodies dissolving into radiant oblivion.
A love letter to the in-between spaces, I Can Hear The Grass Grow is a record of quiet wonder—an invitation to pause, listen, and lose yourself in its tender, translucent glow, where nature breathes through every note.