Cinematic in scope and discombobulating in tone, fiddle player, Eoghan Neff’s first album in 10 years is a document for the times we are living through.

Unrecalled comes as a beautifully designed art box, featuring audio, visuals and text, the intriguing visuals borrowed from the work of an obscure Aran Islands photographer from the 1930s, one Kathleen Price.

Neff describes the album as “a dialogue about our relationship with memory”, but it is so much more than that too. Anchored by fragments of traditional tunes, Unrecalled traces a route into the darkest of corners in the company of many bespoke instruments, from Seán MacErlaine’s adapted car hooter to Anxo Lorenzo’s gaita galega and Seán Carpio’s drums “through spring tank”.

With guest artists from Ireland, Spain and Iceland, this collection is unsettling and enthralling in equal measure. At times it’s filled with existential dread while at others its lightness of touch feels like a welcome release that reaches for a bluer sky, a brighter day.

The lengthy gestation serves Neff well: solid foundations rooted in the tradition take nervous flight, their trajectories unpredictable but thoroughly gripping, even if they’ll utterly challenge the faint of heart.