After more than a decade of quietly reshaping the UK’s alt‑folk landscape, This Is The Kit return with their seventh album Ghost Coat — a record that feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in friendship, ritual and the strange ways we try to make sense of the world. Released January 15th, 2027 via Memphis Industries, it’s a project shaped by community, collaboration and the soft, uncanny magic that has always lived inside Kate Stables’ songwriting.
Recorded at Rockfield Studios in the Wye Valley, Ghost Coat gathers a constellation of voices from across the band’s extended family: Richard Dawson, Sam Amidon, Ben Howard, Emma Broughton (Blumi), and Portron Portron Lopez’s Valentin and Marceau Portron. Long‑time bandmates Rozi Plain, Neil Smith, Jamie Whitby‑Coles and Jesse D. Vernon form the album’s backbone, their presence woven through the record like familiar handwriting.
Stables describes the album as a celebration of the people who make us feel anchored. “When you hear the voice of someone that means a lot to you, it can destroy you in a good way,” she says. “It makes me happy hearing all the voices, especially because of the themes of friendship.” That sentiment runs through the album like a pulse — a reminder that home isn’t always a place, but a person, a moment, a shared breath.
The album’s first single, ‘Skim A Stone’, arrives as a meditation on the rituals we cling to when life feels uncertain. Stables reflects on the tiny superstitions and repetitive behaviours that help us steady ourselves — the eyelash wish, the folded crisp, the stone that skips three times if the universe is listening.
Director Stewart Baxter leans into that ambiguity in the accompanying video, letting Stables move through objects and spaces without forcing meaning onto them. It’s a gentle, open‑ended portrait of someone “practising at life,” as Baxter puts it — a phrase that feels like a thesis for the entire album.
Home is the album’s central ghost — sometimes a physical place, sometimes a feeling, sometimes just the spot where you put your bag down. Stables, who travels frequently, describes the tug of homesickness as something that can strike anywhere, even in moments of joy. That tension — between belonging and wandering, between solitude and connection — shapes Ghost Coat’s emotional landscape.
The album’s title comes from a shadow in Stables’ new home, a phrase that echoed in her mind until it became a kind of mantra. “Ghost coat” becomes a symbol of memory, protection, disguise, and the unseen forces that accompany us. The record closes with the looping, invented phrase “gwennu betsu”, a soft sound Stables associates with soothing repetition — the kind of linguistic drift that mirrors the album’s dream‑like quality.
As ever, Stables treats language like an instrument. Words repeat, mutate, dissolve. Invertebrates and friendly garter snakes appear alongside references to Best in Show. The imagery feels impressionistic, like overhearing someone’s thoughts as they wander through a forest or unpack a suitcase in a new city.
It’s an album that invites you to lean in rather than decode — to sit with its textures, its voices, its gentle strangeness.
With Ghost Coat, This Is The Kit step into a new chapter that feels both deeply personal and quietly communal. The band will take the record across the UK, Europe and the US in 2027, bringing its themes of connection and shared experience to rooms where those ideas resonate most strongly.
The album arrives on Indie Exclusive Poltergeist Pink vinyl, a Dinked Edition Splattered Spectre vinyl with signed print, and all standard formats — a physical echo of the record’s spectral, tactile world.
Album Tracklisting
1.Safety Valve
2.Skim A Stone
3.Catcher
4.Builders
5.Lamp Post
6.Ghost Coat
7.Tiny Eyes
8.Toad In The Hole
9.Fall Away
10.Lovely Grub
11.Fiver
12.Not Enough Is Enough
THIS IS THE KIT TOUR DATES
2026
20 Nov - Les Créatives @ Salle Grand-Salève, Geneva, CH
21 Nov - Bluebird Festival, Vienna, AT
13 Dec - Duyster Festival @ Cactus, Bruges, BE
2027
26 Jan - Celtic Connections @ Fruitmarket, Glasgow, UK
30 Jan - Bristol Beacon, Bristol, UK
10 Mar - Crookes Social Club, Sheffield, UK
11 Mar - The Glasshouse, Gateshead, UK
12 Mar - Hangar34, Liverpool, UK
13 Mar - Coventry Central Library, Coventry, UK
14 Mar - Junction 1, Cambridge, UK
23 Mar - Tubby's, Kingston, NY, US
24 Mar - Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY, US
25 Mar - Warehouse XI, Somerville, MA, US
26 Mar - Higher Ground Showcase Lounge, Burlington, VT, US
27 Mar - Théâtre Fairmount, Montreal, QC, CA
29 Mar - The Garrison, Toronto, ON, CA
30 Mar - The Ark, Ann Arbour, MI, US
01-03 Apr - Big Ears Festival, Konxville, TN, US
04 Apr - Turf Club, Minneapolis, MN, US
06 Apr - Stoughton Opera House, Stoughton, WI, US
07 Apr - Constellation, Chicago, IL, US
09 Apr - The Warhol Theater, Pittsburgh, PA, US
10 Apr - Songbyrd, Washington DC, US
11 Apr - Johnny Brenda's, Philadelphia, PA, US
24 Apr - Bogen F, Zurich, CH
25 Apr - Kuppel, Basel, CH
28 Apr - Karlstorbahnhof, Heidelberg, DE
29 Apr - Frannz Club, Berlin, DE
01 May - Vega, Copenhagen, DK
02 May - Knust, Hamburg, DE
04 May - Maroquinerie, Paris, FR
06 May - De Roma, Antwerp, BE
07 May - Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, NL
24 Sep - Button Factory, Dublin, IE
25 Sep - Roisin Dubh, Galway, IE
26 Sep - Live at St Luke’s, Cork IE
28 Sep - Tramshed, Cardiff, UK
29 Sep - Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK
01 Oct - New Century Hall, Manchester, UK
03 Oct - The Crossing, Birmingham, UK
07 Oct - Roundhouse, London, UK