SAOR
Aura (2020)

Digipack

Third full-length album from one-man Scottish Atmospheric Celtic Metal
project Saor.

Recorded over two years in Cairndow and the Isle of Skye, the new release contains five majestic new tracks
with a playing time of just under an hour. Musically it carries on where "Aura" left off, weaving together
intelligently-crafted guitar riffs, soaring folk melodies and stirring string sections, taking you on a journey
throughout the majestic, mist-covered Highland landscapes.

As well as being inspired by nature, the album takes influence from various traditional Scottish poems
which cover a range of themes such as ancient battles, cultural heritage and sorrow.


Ascolta su YouTube

Six panels digipack with UV foil over print

Saor / scottish flag pin badge for jackets. 

Expertly transitioning between atmospheric Black Metal, Celtic Folk, and traditional Scottish sounds – the wildly exploratory music of SAOR knows no limitations and seeks out every opportunity to expand on its potential. On the band’s third full-length ‘Guardians’, mastermind Andy Marshall channels the Caledonian spirit and landscape into beautiful and vigorous music.

For fans of WINTERFYLLETH, PANOPTICON, AGALLOCH

Cyan / White Marble

SAOR is Andy Marshall's one-man vehicle for what he calls Caledonian Metal: an atmospheric black metal sound built from Highland landscapes and Scottish ancestral memory. Since founding the project in Glasgow in 2013, Marshall has grown SAOR from a cult curiosity into one of the genre's most distinctive voices.
‘Caledonia’ gathers five songs first heard on ‘Roots’, ‘Aura’ and ‘Guardians’ and rebuilds them from the ground up, produced by Chris Fielding. This isn't a remaster or a victory lap. Marshall wrote these songs before he had the resources or the mileage to realise them fully, and over a decade of touring has reshaped how they live and breathe on stage. The album opens with "Aura MMXXVI", a hushed procession through forests and corries that sets the record's terms early: patience, scale, and a reverence for landscape that never tips into pastiche. "The Awakening MMXXVI" answers with something more urgent, a call to old ways and older gods dressed in Marshall's most direct lyric writing on the record, the kind of song built to be shouted back at a festival crowd. "Carved in Stone MMXXVI", the album's centrepiece and lead single, carries the clearest sense of destiny and prophecy in the track list, its widescreen production giving the song's ancestral imagery real physical weight. "Hearth MMXXVI" turns inward, trading myth for something closer to memory, a meditation on home and belonging that grounds the record before its close. "Tears of a Nation MMXXVI" ends the album on its most elegiac note, mourning loss and ruin in a way that feels earned rather than performed, closing the circle the record opened with.
Guest contributions from strings, whistle, pipes and additional vocals widen the textures throughout without diluting the atmosphere, and the sequencing across all five songs traces a clear arc from landscape to legend to loss.

SAOR is Andy Marshall's one-man vehicle for what he calls Caledonian Metal: an atmospheric black metal sound built from Highland landscapes and Scottish ancestral memory. Since founding the project in Glasgow in 2013, Marshall has grown SAOR from a cult curiosity into one of the genre's most distinctive voices.
‘Caledonia’ gathers five songs first heard on ‘Roots’, ‘Aura’ and ‘Guardians’ and rebuilds them from the ground up, produced by Chris Fielding. This isn't a remaster or a victory lap. Marshall wrote these songs before he had the resources or the mileage to realise them fully, and over a decade of touring has reshaped how they live and breathe on stage. The album opens with "Aura MMXXVI", a hushed procession through forests and corries that sets the record's terms early: patience, scale, and a reverence for landscape that never tips into pastiche. "The Awakening MMXXVI" answers with something more urgent, a call to old ways and older gods dressed in Marshall's most direct lyric writing on the record, the kind of song built to be shouted back at a festival crowd. "Carved in Stone MMXXVI", the album's centrepiece and lead single, carries the clearest sense of destiny and prophecy in the track list, its widescreen production giving the song's ancestral imagery real physical weight. "Hearth MMXXVI" turns inward, trading myth for something closer to memory, a meditation on home and belonging that grounds the record before its close. "Tears of a Nation MMXXVI" ends the album on its most elegiac note, mourning loss and ruin in a way that feels earned rather than performed, closing the circle the record opened with.
Guest contributions from strings, whistle, pipes and additional vocals widen the textures throughout without diluting the atmosphere, and the sequencing across all five songs traces a clear arc from landscape to legend to loss.