THE STORY

Pulling together this album made me notice the threads in my own language.

Textures that envelop you like a hug. Simple moments of collective singing that pack a punch, the way those famed Welsh hymns I grew up with in the Valleys do. Ideas of ritual. Communities. What home means to us. The act of humans coming together. Our breath.

These threads come from real places. I was a teenager in the National Youth Choir of Wales, and that experience made choral music available to me, not something distant or othered but as a home. As Composer-in-Residence with the Choir of Royal Holloway, I learnt my craft by being allowed to make mistakes and to grow. And my recent work with Kantos has shown me how my music lives in the big wide world, carried by voices who owe me nothing yet give everything.

i breathe is a decade of that living and learning. Recorded with the choirs who shaped me, and released with gratitude to every singer who taught me that music is never made alone.

Nathan James Dearden (2026)

Highlights

i breathe: one of Dearden’s most performed and streamed works; a meditation on landscape, stillness and listening.

Three Motets: commissioned by the Presteigne Festival and written for choir and cello, with Maxim Calver, reflecting on the ancient motet tradition and sacred space.

Everything about us: written for the National Youth Choir of Wales, exploring individuality, ritual and collective expression, with rhythmic influences drawn from underground trance music.

Morals + Interludes: five short works exploring memory, identity and the digital traces of contemporary life, developed with members of the National Youth Choirs Fellowship.

RELEASED
6 NOVEMBER 2026 on signum RECORDS