The Rabbitts made their fourth album the hard way. At the start of 2026, founding members Lucy May and Odhran Linsey took themselves off to an off-grid retreat in the Pyrenees, stripped out the everyday distractions, and wrote. The songs that came out of it became Paradise, out today.

The Norwich four-piece have always traded in something atmospheric: folk, alternative and ambient pop threaded together with intertwined vocals, fingerstyle guitar, mandolin and hypnotic rhythms. BBC Radio 6 Music once called them “ethereal and understated,” and that’s a fair summary of where they started. Paradise pushes past it. Recorded with the full band, drummer Julien Beghain and bassist Robin G. Breeze, at The Boathouse Studio on the banks of the River Orwell, it takes those intimate folk roots somewhere richer and more cinematic.

Focus track “Mayfly” is a good way in: it carries the band’s signature delicacy but opens it out, the kind of song that rewards close listening without demanding it. There’s a warmth to the whole record that likely owes something to how it was made, written by a couple who married in 2025, recorded with a band who clearly know each other’s instincts, in a studio on the water.

The band have come a long way from where they began. Lucy and Odhran started out busking and writing their way through Canada, living in a van for around 18 months before heading home to the UK. The line-up settled in 2022, and since then they’ve passed 1.2 million Spotify streams, sold out more than half of a 15-date UK tour in 2025, and played Greenbelt, Boomtown and HowTheLightGetsIn. Paradise marks another first: it’s their debut vinyl pressing, funded by a successful fan campaign.

Paradise is out now, followed by a PRS Foundation-supported 15-date UK headline tour running through November and December.

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