HECTOR GANNET - To Release New Album 'The Great Shakedown' - Advance Stream

This October, North Eastern folk-rockers Hector Gannet return with their new full-length offering, ‘The Great Shakedown’.

Hector Gannet have always known that place and music are inseparable. For songwriter and guitarist Aaron Duff, North Shields high on England’s north east coast, shaped by fishing, shipbuilding, and the sea, is not just a backdrop but a source. Everything flows from it: the imagery, the politics, the particular stoicism of people who absorb more than their share and keep moving anyway.

‘The Great Shakedown’, their third album, is where that source runs deepest. Featuring bold brass arrangements alongside choir and church bells recorded live at the 17th-century Christ Church in North Shields, the album is Hector Gannet’s most ambitious and most searching work. The brass is a constant throughout: driving the Dexys-style urgency of the title track, lounging through the jazz-tinged “Big White Telephone”, surging euphorically through singles “The Mother Tongue” and “Seven Signs”.

The singles capture something essential about the album, euphoric on the surface, quietly devastating underneath. Beneath propulsive brass, lies an examination of stoicism as both armour and wound, of shared language used to avoid saying the very things that need to be said. It’s a quality that runs through the whole record, which looks at human history and art, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the actions of those in power and the communities who live with the consequences.

‘The Great Shakedown’ is a journey, and like all journeys it arrives somewhere. That somewhere is “No Money No Time”, a reprise and amalgam of threads pulled from across the album, rebuilt into something communal and euphoric. A vital and powerful rallying cry for unity. Above all ‘The Great Shakedown’ sings about people, loss, the importance of good over bad, and of community over isolation.

The new single, “The Mother Tongue”, reprises the unabashed emotive potency that has seen this North Shields group praised by people as diverse as Chris Packham and Sam Fender and acclaimed as “North Shields’ answer to Crazy Horse” by Uncut magazine. While its music is driven-on by surging brass parts, its words look at mortality and the idea that whereof we cannot speak we must sing.

Hector Gannet will perform ‘The Great Shakedown’ in full at Gateshead’s Glasshouse Sage Two on 27 November 2026. ‘The Great Shakedown’ is released on Guga Records on 23 October 2026 and will be available as vinyl, CD and download.

*****

Hector Gannet are both band and solo project, centred on songwriter and guitarist Aaron Duff, from North Shields high on England’s North East coast – a town shaped by the fishing and shipbuilding industries and by the sea. Two albums in, with debut Big Harcar (2020) and the acclaimed The Land Belongs To Us (2023) long sold out, Hector Gannet have built a reputation as a distinctive voice in British folk and rock. MOJO awarded four stars to The Land Belongs To Us, praising its “pointedly political, natural-world-advocating folk rock”. Tom Robinson on BBC 6 Music greeted a “band of exceptional talent”. Sam Fender, a North Shields schoolmate of Aaron’s and now one of British music’s biggest names, has called Aaron “a fucking great songwriter”.

With their previous records, Hector Gannet celebrated the culture and community of the North East, drawing on the coastline and heritage of a place that has always lived close to loss. The group are named after a fishing vessel of the same name, which Aaron’s late paternal grandfather served on and which suffered fatal misadventure in 1968. ‘The Great Shakedown’ goes further still in its communal engagement. This is Aaron ringing a bell for things larger and less easily named. The new album looks at communities dispersed without ceremony, industries silenced without mourning and the kind of hurt and absence that can settle into the machinery of daily life. The album rings a bell for all of this – a sound intended as much with hope as with lament.

The album is Hector Gannet’s boldest work to date. There are brass arrangements by North Shields-resident US musician Jason Holcomb, whose credits include Ohio soul legends The O’Jays. The album features choir and church bells recorded at the 17th-century Christ Church in North Shields, with the bells’ melody plotted by the church’s own Ringing Master. The Great Shakedown expands the Hector Gannet sound without losing what made it essential. The brass pulses through the Dexys-influenced urgency of the title track. It simmers amid the jazz-tinged Big White Telephone and then surges euphorically through single The Mother Tongue. The latter song examines stoicism as both armour and wound, mulling on the peculiar cruelty of a shared language built around not saying the things that needs to be said.

Mixed by Grammy-winning Eduardo De La Paz (Self Esteem, Charlatans, Frightened Rabbit) and mastered at Abbey Road Studios, the album is a journey – from waiting to gathering, from individual grief to collective reckoning, from the single voice to the many. It moves through political fury and personal loss, through faith and its absence, through the cost of labour and the rituals people reach for when language fails them. Closing track No Money No Time (The Great Reprise) pulls together the album’s themes and threads, sounding out a defiant clarion: “No money, no time… no more!”

*****

HECTOR GANNET – 2026 LIVE DATES

Aug 9^th – The Fire Station – Sunderland (with John Grant)

Aug 29th – Krankenhaus Festival – The English Lake District

Oct 3rd – Twisterella Festival – Middlesbrough

Oct 28th – Musicport Festival – Whitby

Nov 27th – Sage Hall Two – Glasshouse Gateshead (album launch)