The Man in the Mountain is the new album by Northern-Irish singer songwriter Bróna McVittie including tracks released as a double A side single in January 2020, The Green Man and Eileen Aroon. This follows Bróna’s 2018 debut album We Are the Wildlife, and showcases new collaborations with avant-garde Nordic composer Arve Henriksen on The Lark in the Clear Air and electronic duo Isan on Eileen Aroon and Falling for Icarus.

McVittie’s second album includes fewer traditional folk songs than her debut with more focus on her original compositions, drawn from her deep love and knowledge of Irish folk mythology, music and the natural world. The title track The Man in the Mountain explores the legend of Irish giant Finn McCool wrapping it in a rich tapestry of harp, drones and hushed vocals. Henriksen and McVittie together find a completely new mood for widely-favoured Irish folk song The Lark in the Clear Air. His experimental trumpet and electronics provide an innovative sound-bed for her elongated vocal phrasing that stretches two verses across seven minutes, paying deep reverence to the well-known Samuel Ferguson ballad. Electronica trailblazers Robin Saville & Antony Ryan (Isan) co-arrange 14th-century folk song Eileen Aroon and original sun-worshipping anthem Falling for Icarus, which adopts nuclear fusion as a metaphor for love. Elsewhere on the album, as Bróna weaves a thread between cosmology and ancient myths, track titles abound with literary references from poets and authors including Siegfried Sassoon (Glamour Obscures her Gaze), Pablo Neruda (Secretly, Between the Shadow and the Soul), William Wordsworth (So Be it When I Shall Grow Old) and Henry Williamson (Strange and Forgotten Things of the Moor) reflecting the breadth of her influences.

The album releases on 2nd September 2020 via Company of Corkbots