Haunt the Woods

Four friends between Plymouth and the Tamar

Haunt the Woods came together in the countryside where Devon runs into Cornwall, four friends who by their own account were all local to one another and drifted into playing together rather than answering an advert. When the Bittersweet Symphonies blog interviewed them in May 2017 they said they had been a band for about two years. The early line-up was Jonathan Stafford on vocals and guitar, Phoenix Elleschild on lead guitar, Alex Skinner on bass and Olly Bignell on drums.

The first version of the group was, in their words, 'really folky', built around a cajón and at one point a flute. That gave way to a full drum kit, bass and piano and what they described, half joking, as a 'psych alt rock kind of thingy sound'. By May 2017 they had a debut EP, The Line, carrying the singles Beautiful Catastrophe and Twisted, had supported Dry the River and Sunset Suns, and had sold out Carnglaze Caverns, the former slate mine near Liskeard that has been their home fixture ever since. A second EP, Circle, followed, and the band's Bandcamp page still lists both alongside their first album, Opaque, which came out in 2020.

Opaque, Spinefarm and the making of Ubiquity

Opaque was the last record they released on their own. By the time the second album was announced they had signed to Spinefarm, the Universal-owned rock label, and the news came through Prog magazine's Jerry Ewing on 22 June 2023, with the single Gold and its video. Fever Dream had already gone out as the lead single in April. Ubiquity followed on 29 September 2023, twelve tracks running from Fever Dream and Gold through Save Me, Equilibrium, Home, The Line Part II, Now Is Our Time, the title track, Overflow, Sleepwalking and Numb to the closer Said And Done. By then Jack Hale had taken over on bass.

The album was produced by Peter Miles at Middle Farm Studios, and the band told When The Horn Blows in October 2023 that somewhere between forty and fifty per cent of it was written during pre-production there. Simon Dobson and the Parallax Orchestra arranged the orchestral parts, with cellist Maddie Cutter and Will Harvey, formerly of Dry the River, among the guests. Stafford framed the record around a single question, 'what is my place in this failing world?', and described its themes as loss, life, love, joy and what he called the ubiquitous nature of connection and consciousness. The sessions also produced one lasting anecdote: Stafford broke a toe running through the control room, then broke the same toe on the other foot the following day, and Bignell and a colleague wrote a song about it.

They spent the summer of 2023 playing the record in: 2000trees in Cheltenham on 5 July, Tunes in the Sands on Dartmoor, Chagstock, Leopallooza in Bude, and Reading and Leeds. The launch show on release day was at Carnglaze Caverns. Elleschild said it was the third or fourth time they had played there and that the acoustics still surprised them; Stafford called it the band's favourite venue.

What the critics heard

The Prog Mind reviewed Ubiquity on its release day and pushed back on the press-release comparisons to Radiohead, Queen and Muse, saying it heard very little of any of them. What it found instead was 'a sound all their own, an indie-sprinkled, folk-birthed alternative rock', with more of a debt to Pink Floyd's experimental period. Gold, with what the reviewer called a massive stringed accompaniment, was singled out as a candidate for song of the year; The Line Part II earned praise for its piano, violin and guitar solo; Home drew a comparison to Atom Heart Mother; and Save Me was described as one of the rawest things on the record. Stafford's voice got particular attention for its character and range.

The live reviews from that autumn told the same story. When The Scene saw the band headline Moles in Bath in November 2023, the verdict was that 'this is a band deftly capable of a mature and diverse sound' and that the show went beyond what the recordings could do. Numb, in particular, was said to 'sing' on stage in a way it did not on the album, and the room's reaction to the opening bars of Said and Done was described as euphoric, with fans bouncing before the song had properly started.

A festival of their own on Looe Beach

Rather than wait for a bigger bill to come to them, the band built one. Kernowfornia is a three-day festival on Looe Beach on Cornwall's south coast, founded and organised by Haunt the Woods, and its first edition ran in late September 2025. Leo Trimming of The Progressive Aspect covered the Friday, 26 September 2025, and noted that the band already had a relationship with Marillion, having supported them before.

The band's own set that afternoon opened with the whole festival crew brought on stage for a round of applause. The material was mostly from Ubiquity with older songs mixed in: Gold, which Trimming called brooding; the title track, carried by a gentle vocal from Stafford; and The Line, one of the oldest things they play. The review described an assured and confident performance that won the crowd over, and called them 'a talented but emotionally intuitive band' who made the future of rock look safe. Songkick's listings show the band also played dates in Poland in May 2025, part of a gigography that now runs past a hundred shows.

Autumn 2026: fourteen nights with Marillion

The biggest run of the band's career was announced on 17 November 2025, when Louder reported that Marillion would tour the UK in September and October 2026 with Haunt the Woods as support on every date. Tickets went on sale on 20 November 2025. The tour opens at Portsmouth Guildhall on Saturday 12 September 2026 and closes with two nights at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on 1 October, a seated show, and 2 October, standing. In between it takes in Brighton Dome, York Barbican, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Bristol Beacon, Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall, Aylesbury, Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Cambridge Corn Exchange, the Glasshouse in Gateshead, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall and the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Songkick currently lists thirteen of those dates against the band's name.

Steve Hogarth's line on the announcement was that 'there's nothing quite like playing live in the UK' and that the emotional energy at these shows is usually extraordinary. Marillion are expected to work new material into their sets from an album still in progress. For Haunt the Woods the tour puts them in front of a large, loyal and attentive progressive rock audience in concert halls rather than clubs, and does so three years after Ubiquity with no follow-up album yet announced in the sources reviewed here. Stafford said in October 2023 that he did not know what the record's spiritual underpinning was, 'but maybe we'll get closer to understanding it on our next record'. That is where the story currently stands.