During my nine-year journey as a student at Houston Community College, now known as Houston City College, I first discovered William D. Drake’s music about 15 years ago. At the time, I was listening to Sid Smith’s Podcasts from the Yellow Room on my 80GB iPod, where he played everything from Steve Dinsdale, Dungen, Tangerine Dream, A Formal Horse, The Knells, Isildurs Bane, and Elephant9 with Reine Fiske. But then something completely different came along.
Listening to ‘The Mastodon’ from Drake’s 2011 album The Rising of the Lights caught me completely by surprise. It had this thumping-turned-galloping piano, complex guitars, pounding drums, late-’60s psychedelic organ work, and a steampunk atmosphere that immediately grabbed my attention. My reaction was essentially, “What the hell was that?! What did he just do there?! Play that again!”
After hearing Sid’s podcast, I went ahead and bought the album straight away on iTunes before heading to the Dallas/Fort Worth area with my mom. Eventually, in 2015, I picked up the physical release through the Wayside Music website, along with his fifth studio album, Revere Reach. The Rising of the Lights ultimately became my album of the year for 2011 and, later, my album of the decade for the 2010s.
Now, 11 years after the release of his fifth album, Revere Reach, it is wonderful to see Cardiacs alumnus William D. Drake returning once again with Moulded By Industry. On his follow-up to Revere Reach, Drake delves deeper into emotional textures and old texts, setting words from Thomas Ashe, 17th-century ballads, and John Clare, the Northamptonshire poet often known as the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”, to music. Clare’s writing clearly struck a chord with Drake, inspiring him to capture the authentic, ground-level character of his home country of England and weave that influence into his arrangements.
With James Larcombe, Dean Gaisburgh-Watkyrn, and Steve Jackson returning, alongside new crew member and singer Treana Morris, Drake brings a powerful emotional weight to Moulded by Industry. Together, they carry forward the poetry, love, loss, and sense of place that unfold across his sixth album.
The album begins with the Beatles-esque lullaby ‘The Flickering Shade’, which opens with the lyric, “Flutter of something in the past, that made / A light of white across the flickering shade / That passed us near / But will come back no more”. There is a Beatles-like quality here that feels like something Lennon and McCartney might have wished they had written. Yet Drake takes it somewhere more ethereal, creating an uplifting sensation of floating upward into the heavens, where it feels as though it is finally time to be free from pain and hardship and reunite with loved ones in the afterlife.
Between ‘Green Shadows’ and the return of ‘Me Fish Bring’ from The Rising of the Lights, these pieces feel both exquisite and deeply emotional. They reflect the poetic reprise of walking forward and observing the different parts of the English countryside through mournful waltzes, country-folk textures, sliding acoustic guitar, eerie ghostly vocalisations, and the resurrection-like presence of Mellotron. Treana’s vocal work follows Drake’s chant-like, somber composition, adding another emotional layer to the arrangement.
These songs almost feel like sequels to Drake’s earlier work. As I mentioned before, there is that unmistakable steampunk atmosphere set within a Victorian-era world, as though Drake could have written and staged this as a through-composed musical. It is a fitting approach from an artist whose history is so closely connected to Cardiacs and its late frontman Tim Smith.
‘Turtledove’ is a beautiful and romantic composition, built around an overwhelming ballad that recalls Genesis’ 1969 debut From Genesis to Revelation. Genesis began as a psychedelic-folk-rock group with a Bee Gees-esque quality before developing the progressive sound that would define their classic Charisma-era run from 1970 to 1974 when Peter was in the band. Drake taps into a similar sense of pastoral psychedelia here, creating something nostalgic while still remaining distinctly his own.
On ‘A Vision,’ we get the sense that Drake is crossing into territory somewhere between Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The harmonium creates a looping, repetitive introduction before Drake sings, “I lost the love of heaven above / I spurned the lust of earth below / I felt the sweets of fancied love / And hell itself my only foe”. It is a song about confronting one’s former self, and Drake puts his heart and soul into the idea of moving forward while reflecting on the good, the bad, and the ugly of childhood.
He goes for the jugular with Clare’s poetic textures, embedding them deeply into the arrangements. The nightmarish ‘Bliss Again’ reflects a profound sense of loss, with Mellotron flutes floating beneath what feels like a blue sky slowly overtaken by dark, grey clouds moving toward the horizon.
There is still a psychedelic power at work, capturing the idea that love may once have seemed perfect before reality inevitably delivered its harshest reminder. In that sense, Drake’s voyage carries something of a Peter Hammill-like intensity.
Then Drake returns to psychedelic Mellotron textures with the tap-dancing, vaudevillian sing-along ‘Love in the Universe’. The song reaches back toward the golden age of Hollywood, and you can almost envision it being written for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as they dance across the screen.
At the same time, Drake tips his hat to Ray Davies and the Village Green era, returning once again to the English countryside and the musical roots that have shaped so much of his work. What a welcoming return for William D. Drake. Moulded By Industry may be challenging, twisted, emotional, and surreal, but that is exactly what makes his music so rewarding. There are layers upon layers of textures, poetry, and melodies that reveal themselves with each listen.
Sixteen years after The Rising of the Lights first made me stop and think, “What the hell was that?! What did he just do there? I need to play that one more time!”, Drake has once again created something that feels completely his own. Moulded By Industry is a beautiful, strange, and deeply emotional journey, and one of my favourite albums for 2026.
