There’s no shortage of bands making music that circles around the theme of time’s passage, so why should you care about Pavey Ark? Because when Pavey Ark talk about time, they don’t talk about hours, days and years: they talk about epochs.
More Time, More Speed sees the band pushing their psychedelic-tinged folk sound further than ever. The foundations – mostly trickling guitars and quivering violins – feel birthed from a similar ecosystem to Big Thief, but Pavey Ark lean harder on the spacious atmospherics, and it culminates in an album that feels intentionally unrefined, and where every song sounds like something is being awoken.
The music on this album is luscious and inviting, but always precarious, never quite sturdy enough to suggest total comfort. It’s like ambling through an endless labyrinth, searching for where they belong as the world shifts underfoot. They still slide in some surprises into the instrumentals – the harmonica that sweeps its way through the atmosphere on ‘Epochs’ and the languid trumpets that pop up throughout – but ultimately, it’s the slow build ups that coalesce into hazy, compelling hooks that are this album’s hallmark. While not immediate, they are certainly effective. The standout is ‘The Devil’s Time’, a six-minute slow burn that proves Pavey Ark are a band with the intelligence to know exactly when less is more.
The same could be said for the lyrics, which are often abstract but never broadly sketched. Pavey Ark are looking to deconstruct the complicated but necessary connection we all have with time’s passage, and do not shy away from the messiness time leaves in its wake. For every moment you cherish, there’s at least one you regret. For every ‘Your Sweet Time’, where the time spent with someone becomes its own kind of gift, there’s a ‘Yesterday Is Done’, where the weight of the time they shared together makes the breakup sting all the more. And yet there’s a quiet, plodding acceptance to it all. A knowledge that standing still is not an option, and part of being human is to take the good with the bad. Nothing is permanent, right down to the atoms that make us all up
More Time, More Speed is the kind of unassuming album that will blindside you with its nuance. Above all, it’s music tailor made for introverted contemplation. Whether you get any mileage out of it beyond that is an open question, but in terms of fulfilling that purpose, I can hardly imagine an album doing it better.
Pavey Ark: More Time, More Speed – Released 21 November 2025
Ark – Yesterday Is Done (Official Video)
