Ellie Goulding Celebrates 10 Years Of ‘Halcyon’ With ‘Halcyon Nights’
Fans are encouraged to share memories, photos, and videos of the ‘Halcyon’ era on a special micro site.
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Ellie Goulding’s massive sophomore album Halcyon, the pop star has unveiled a new two-part celebration entitled Halcyon Nights.
Shop the best of Ellie Goulding’s discography on vinyl and more.
Halcyon Nights is split into two parts: Part 1 is the original album and Part 2 comprises bonus tracks from the Halcyon era including six songs that are not currently available across all DSPs.
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To help celebrate the release, Goulding is offering up limited edition merchandise, a live performance watch party, and a micro site on which fans can share videos, pictures, and key memories from the Halcyon period.
Released in 2012, Halcyon–and its subsequent reboot, Halcyon Days–was the turning point for Ellie Goulding. Lights, her 2010 debut album, had proved a strong critical and commercial success, with the acclaim focusing on her distinctive voice and sharp songwriting sensibility. Goulding’s breakthrough had an organic energy that suggested she could develop her musical identity in a number of different ways.
There was a strong folk-pop core to a lot of Ellie Goulding’s songwriting, mixed with an interest in electronica and a gritty, almost untethered appetite to explore complex emotional themes and exciting soundscapes. That it all gelled so brilliantly on Halcyonspeaks volumes about her talent, laying the groundwork for her elevation to the next level: pop’s premier league.
Halcyon had been recorded in breaks between the relentless promotional pressure of Lights, largely in studios near the Herefordshire village where Goulding had been brought up. Along with producer Jim Eliot, from electro-pop act Kish Mauve, 12 tracks emerged from the album sessions (Eliot worked on seven, while other collaborators helped with the rest). As the UK was consumed by Olympics fever in July 2012, a cover of Active Child’s “Hanging On” was released as a promotional track and featured Tinie Tempah on one of the remixes.
With Halcyon, Goulding kept us guessing as to which way she would turn. By the end of the campaign for this multi-million-selling album, it was clear she had pulled off the extraordinary: found a route that would allow us to enjoy that soulful authenticity while creating some of the biggest commercial hits of our time. Now, a decade later, she is revisiting that magic.
