The Bookshop Band are the musical offspring of an artistic love-affair between two award winning songwriters and an independent bookshop in the UK, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. The songs are the musical outpouring of the band’s own response to books they have read. They have so far existed largely off-grid, occupying a creative space between the music and book worlds, writing songs inspired by books and bringing them, through music, to a new audience. They have written and recorded 13 albums and performed in hundreds of bookshops. Emerge, Return marks the band’s first album to have a wider commercial release and will come out, alongside a podcast series of conversations with the authors. The artwork for the cover was created by Stanley Donwood (Radiohead / Glastonbury Festival). It’s one of the band’s darker albums, responding to themes surrounding the oppression of bodies, free will and free speech, explored in books that include The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and The Book Of Dust, by Philip Pullman. The title comes from their song inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which glimpses our underworlds and morality in the scale of deep time. The books were chosen through a number of curations, including the author events at Mr B’s, but also by the V&A Museum, written for their season on banned books, and for the National Portrait Gallery, responding to their exhibition on the Brontë sisters.