Culture

Play Those Chocolate Sprinkles, Rend Collective!

The Irish band’s new album “FOLK!” proclaims joy after suffering.

Rend Collective standing with instruments in the forest
Christianity Today November 21, 2024
Courtesy of Rend Collective

Rend Collective is known for its joy.

The Northern Irish folk band has spent much of the past decade on tour—singing worship songs with charming accents, playing eclectic instruments, and sharing its relentless commitment to celebration. By the end of each concert, Rend Collective’s crowds are encouraged. And covered in confetti.

But joy within the group had started to wane, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. A year ago, the band was facing a decision about its future.

Last autumn “could have been a moment where Rend Collective could have decided to dissolve,” the band’s lead singer and founding member, Chris Llewellyn, told Christianity Today during an interview in downtown Nashville.

At the time, Llewellyn was emerging from a painful season of doubt. He’d been asking deep theological questions while contending with grief after his son’s autism diagnosis. He’d also finally acknowledged his long-running depression instead of trying to “wrestle it to the ground.”

Llewellyn explored his questions about faith in a September 2023 solo album titled Honest. It was his first public foray into songwriting outside of Rend Collective, and far more personal than most of his prior work.

After Honest, Llewellyn considered what kind of music he wanted to make going forward. Adding to the uncertainty, Gareth Gilkeson, Llewellyn’s primary cowriter and a founding member of Rend Collective, would soon be stepping away from the band.

Llewellyn wondered, “Is this the natural end of things?”

Now 39, Llewellyn has spent most of his adult life in Rend Collective. He began attending Rend back when it was a Bible study for young adults in his Northern Irish hometown of Bangor. The group was named after a call for sincere repentance in the Old Testament Book of Joel: ‘Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God’ (2:13). After the band sprang up from that study, he helped lead it to international success with songs like “Build Your Kingdom Here,” “My Lighthouse,” and “Counting Every Blessing.”

Thinking about Rend Collective’s future while driving late last year, he found himself unintentionally writing yet another worship song. That moment reminded him of his purpose.

“No. This is what you do,” Llewellyn remembered deciding. “The only two options are you’re either going to do this for no audience, or you’re going to do this as your job still. It’s not that you’re ever going to stop doing this.”

That drive resulted in one of Rend Collective’s new songs, “What I Was Made For”—the first new music the band has released in more than two years. Its lyrics recognize the purpose of every human being, to worship and glorify God.

“What I Was Made For” appears on the group’s new album, simply titled FOLK! The project has been both a hopeful rebirth for the band and a return to its roots, with all of the earnestness, joy, and stringed instruments that drew in early fans.

It also drips with matured Christian faith. The joy and hope of FOLK! aren’t shallow or unconsidered. They’re the kind that come in the morning, after a night of weeping (or many nights of weeping).

Llewellyn’s pain is apparent across the album. Yet his words of worship and simple professions of faith are all the sweeter—and all the more genuine and encouraging—for acknowledging it.

He told CT that voicing his doubts in last year’s solo album allowed him to write these new songs. It was almost “like running the faucet and getting all of the dirty water out,” he said.

“I did my worst doubting there—a prayer life with vocabulary that is unprintable—but that’s where the confidence comes,” he said. “Just sitting on the other side of it and being like, well, that’s by no means resolved—all of the questions still hang there—but I just think God is good.”

The fact that God is still there after all of that, he told CT, has given him confidence in God’s character. “It’s relaxed into a place of knowing that God’s got this, that he likes me, and this relationship is going to survive, whatever comes,” he said.

The album’s first song, “Abide in Me,” is a tender, intimate portrait of that relationship. Written from Christ’s perspective, it calls his followers to “build a home here inside my love” and to rest in his sovereignty and grace.

Another song on the album, “Better Than I Ever Thought,” evokes imagery from the parable of the prodigal son.

“I love the particular turn of phrase that the father sees the son from a long way off,” Llewellyn said. For him, that detail speaks to God’s watchfulness. One lyric in the song prompted some pushback: “Never guessed you were desperate for me to come home.”

Rend Collective’s record label flagged that line to Llewellyn, arguing that God isn’t desperate.

“I was like, ‘I think he is,’” Llewellyn recalled.

The writing process for “Better Than I Ever Thought,” as well as others on the record, was a drastic shift for Rend Collective.

“Prior to this, we’ve never had a song that wasn’t cowritten to some degree,” Llewellyn told CT. But now, “we’ve worked out that sometimes when somebody writes something, letting their story be their story is actually the most powerful thing you can do.”

Llewellyn and his bandmates see FOLK! as a success already, simply for that commitment to authenticity.

Cowriter Stephen Mitchell, 31, said FOLK! came about because Rend Collective “stopped striving.”

“Let’s just do what we want to do with the music, and if it works commercially, successfully, then awesome,” said Mitchell, who has been in the group since 2013. “If it doesn’t, then we’re at least being authentic to what we want to do.”

“Holy Trouble,” another song on the album, is one of his favorites. It is an anthem about Christ’s radical compassion, heart for the oppressed, and embodiment of perfect justice—and a prayer for the Holy Spirit to accomplish the same through the modern church.

Llewellyn and Mitchell are proud that their new music doesn’t rely on samples—snippets or components of a song that an artist records separately and then splices together later. Most of FOLK! was recorded around one microphone, with the instruments played at the same time.

“If there is a weird sound of a little crinkly percussion thing, it’s because somebody crinkled something in the room,” Llewellyn said. “We made the decision that we were going to do it the hard way: ‘Set up that mic. Bring that saltshaker over here. Okay, you do the saltshaker. I’ll slap the wall.’ It’s all like that.”

“Silver Or Gold”—jokingly known to Llewellyn and Mitchell as “Irish Pirates” because of the song’s forceful vocals—“is very much people hitting guitars, people hitting the wall,” Llewellyn said.

The band’s members also used small boxes of chocolate sprinkles “quite a bit” as percussion after discovering them while on tour in Europe.

The album’s final song, “Reap That Joy,” is especially “chocolate forward,” according to Llewellyn.

That song draws from his and his wife’s grief over their son’s autism diagnosis, as well as the hope they’ve found in the years since. It weaves gardening metaphors throughout, a love letter to his wife’s recent obsession with plants.

“Resurrection is one of the things that would be impossible for me not to believe in, because it’s happening on a microscale,” he said of the song. “It’s just woven into the pattern of how things work.”

Rend Collective’s own resurrection won’t stop with this album. A single, “Fight of My Life,” is set to be released in January, and the band is planning a special release for St. Patrick’s Day, as well as a follow-up album to complete FOLK!

“I don’t think Rend will ever have a period where it lies fallow for two years again,” Llewellyn said.

Mitchell feels the same way. “I just refuse to believe that the best days are behind me or the best days for the band are behind us,” he said. “We’re just getting started again.”

There’s an Irish drinking toast, he added at the end of the interview: “May the best day of your past be the worst day of your future.”

Llewellyn, inspired, couldn’t help himself. He was already making new plans. “I’d write that song right now,” he told Mitchell as they stood to leave.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS, a nonprofit publication from The Allbritton Journalism Institute.

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