CD Review: Empirical, Like Lambs: To The Slaughter

Empirical have never been a band to stand still, but even by their own restless standards, Like Lambs: To The Slaughter is a genuine leap. I featured this band on our Autumn 2024 print cover, and hearing where they’ve travelled since then has been one of the real pleasures of my listening year. This is their eighth album, and it’s arguably their most ambitious — a 51-minute suite that sits as comfortably alongside contemporary classical music as it does jazz, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

The lineup has shifted since vibraphonist Lewis Wright relocated to the USA, leaving the core trio of Nathaniel Facey (alto sax), Tom Farmer (double bass) and Shaney Forbes (drums) to reshape their sound entirely. Rather than replace Wright, they’ve opened the door to long-time collaborators Ivo Neame on piano and David Preston on guitar, and the results are extraordinary. This is a genuine reinvention of the Empirical sound, built from a radical reworking of Forbes’ self-released 2022 EP into something far larger and more fully realised.

It took me a few listens to find my footing in the album’s architecture — a three-movement suite, The Garden of Beginnings, wrapped around another three-movement suite, Like Lambs, with the standalone pieces Giants and Drogon acting as connective tissue. But once the structure clicked into place, so did the album’s emotional logic, and it’s been rewarding me on every play since. Forbes has described the record as a meditation on “where we all are in the world today – overstimulated and underinformed,” and that tension between noise and clarity runs through every movement.

The opening Garden of Beginnings: Innocence and Bliss sets the tone with flowing piano and melancholic reed lines that nod toward 19th-century romanticism, motifs that return transformed throughout the record. Giants is a highlight for me — ten minutes built from a drum solo over a piano motif that Forbes drew from his study of Yoruba rhythm, and the way the piece travels through so many different modes without ever feeling disjointed is a real achievement.

The central Like Lambs suite is where the album’s emotional weight lives: ethereal and spacious in its first movement, building through fiery interplay between Preston and Neame in its second, and reaching a genuinely moving, free-jazz-inflected dialogue between Facey and Forbes in its third. The Garden of Beginnings: Earth offers a beautifully judged release of tension, all late-night lyricism after the storm.

Empirical with Ivo Neame and David Preston © Karolina Heller

Drogon is the track that will feel most like “classic” Empirical to longtime fans, with a post-Coltrane intensity that’s hard to pin down but impossible to miss — for me, it’s the album’s standout moment. The closing Divine Revelation brings the recurring motifs full circle, dissolving into what Forbes rightly calls a mood of quiet optimism.

This is a bold, fully realised record, and one that rewards patience and repeated listening in equal measure. It may catch some longtime fans off guard, but for me, it’s Empirical’s most complete artistic statement yet. Highly recommended.

Personnel:
Nathaniel Facey, alto saxophone | Tom Farmer, double bass | Shaney Forbes, drums | Ivo Neame, piano | David Preston, guitar

Release Date: 26th June 2026
Format: CD | LP | Streaming
Label: Whirlwind Recordings

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