Violette Records · VIO-088
Hallelujah Trial
The debut album. Recorded inside a Liverpool church. Out Saturday 17 October 2026.
250 copies on 180g vinyl. No repress. The album won’t be streamed.
What happens in the room is the record.
Hallelujah Trial
How it was made
One room, one rule
Tom Roberts and John Canning Yates spent months in John’s front room with a pot of tea, no plan and nothing that had to be finished. Songs turned up. They recorded them as they went. Then they looked at what they had and there was far too much of it.
Hours of material, and no way to choose. Going back through all of it would’ve taken longer than they had left in them, and the focus was going.
John suggested the church. Tom said whatever they got in there would be the record, mistakes and all. The line they used for it started as a joke, borrowed from jazz players who used to tell each other that what happens in the room is the show. Then it stopped being a joke, the launch went into the same building, and the record had a shape.
They recorded in residency at the Gustav Adolf Church on Park Lane in April 2026. No reverb was added to any of it. The building did that.
Start here
‘On Each Branch’
Four minutes of voice, guitar and piano, and a Scandinavian seamen’s church around all three. It’s Tom’s song, written with David McDonnell of The Sand Band, and the first one John sent back with piano on it. It opens the album and it came out on 28 August.
The band
Twenty years in the same city
Tom Roberts
Songs, voice, guitar
Led Cranebuilders and Beatowls. The name is his: he saw a 1960s advert for a western called The Hallelujah Trail, never got round to the film, and moved one letter. He liked the gospel shape underneath it, struggle first and redemption after. Jubilant and Kafkaesque at the same time, in his words.
John Canning Yates
Piano, production, mixing
Founded Ella Guru, the Liverpool collective that earned a Peel session. His reference for this record was the late Johnny Cash period, songs played in a room, where the atmosphere comes out of the feeling in that room and out of Tom’s lyrics rather than out of anything added afterwards. He says they were after a little bit of magic and had it on take four.
They’d known each other since Ella Guru and Cranebuilders were both working bands, swapped tapes, played the same rooms on the same nights, and it still took twenty years before either of them suggested sitting down together. Their first performance in public was on 7 April this year, at the last La Violette Società.
The room
Built in 1884 for people passing through
The Gustav Adolf Church went up on Park Lane for the Scandinavian seamen working the port and for the Nordic emigrants going through Liverpool on their way to America. By the early 1880s that second group was running at 50,000 people a year. Most were in the city for days. Some for hours.
It was there for people who’d left one life and hadn’t arrived at the next one, and it gave them their own language, their own hymns and somebody keeping half an eye on them while they waited. A hundred and forty-two years later, two songwriters turned up in much the same condition.
The launch
Come and hear it in the room where it was made
Saturday 17 October 2026
Doors 8.00pm
The Scandinavian Church, 138 Park Lane, Liverpool L1 8HG
Tom and John play the album end to end in the building it was recorded in. Everyone in the room leaves with a copy in their hands, six days before the post goes out to anybody else.
You don’t buy a ticket for it. You buy the record at the price it costs anywhere, and the evening comes with it.
The record
VIO-088
- Release date
- Saturday 17 October 2026
- Format
- 180g vinyl LP
- Edition
- 250 copies, no repress
- Streaming
- Singles only. Not the album.
- Recorded
- Gustav Adolf Church, Liverpool, April 2026
- Produced and mixed
- John Canning Yates
- Mastered
- Jason Mitchell
- Sleeve
- Pascal Blua, after ‘Of the Rose’, William Turner, 1568
Posted from 23 October. Or collect yours by hand on the night.