Thy Catafalque have released Búcsú a piros madártól, A Farewell to the Red Bird, the song that opens XIII: Sárga erdő. The thirteenth album arrives on 20 November through Season of Mist.
Tamás Kátai wrote and produced it, as he has written and produced everything under this name since 1998. The first thing to say about the song is a small thing that is not small: the drums are played by a person. Every previous record programmed them. They sit under layered voices, kamancheh and lead guitar, and the press material claims the combination hits harder than the title suggests.
Sárga erdő, Yellow Forest, runs to twelve tracks with thirty-four musicians on it and a twenty-voice male choir. Piano, strings, brass, sitar, kamancheh and zither all appear, though Kátai says he used them with more restraint than on last year's XII: A gyönyörű álmok ezután jönnek. He describes the record as carrying no story, only the feeling of walking back through time that is half remembered.
He directed the video himself, in the woodland near his family home in Makó, by the river Maros. The first Thy Catafalque video was filmed on the same ground twenty-five years ago.