Wooff, Toria: Aleister

While on paper Aleister marks the second full-length release from Lancashire songwriter Toria Wooff (Tor-ee-a Woo-f), in many ways it feels like the record she’s been trying to make all along. Written in a brief window of time between finishing 2025’s self-titled debut and its subsequent release, Aleister captures Wooff moving with greater confidence, learning to trust the instinctive nature of her craft.

Lyrically, Aleister is quietly fearless, exploring themes of grief, obsessive compulsive disorder, infertility and recovery, with remarkable sensitivity. Lead single 'The Morrigan’ makes for a striking introduction to the new chapter. With its lyrical roots in Celtic folklore, the song bristles with dark energy, Wooff’s stirring voice joined by sharp, strange sounds that bend and break in the surrounding shadows. “The inspiration from this song came from the theory that for centuries voices heard in the woods, which people would believe to be ghosts, deities, Gods could actually all be down to crows repeating human voices,” Wooff explains.

Whilst Wooff holds up the sonic mirror to British folk horror, accompanying ‘The Morrigan’ is a full length music video (directed by Manchester-based Light In The Tower) which extends the song’s peculiar folkloric world into an equally enigmatic visual language. Abstract imagery sits alongside subtle nods to the Morrigan legend, with the film taking inspiration from the strange, unsettling atmosphere and analogue sensibilities of the 1970s folk horror landscape. The result feels intrinsically connected to the song itself: old folklore filtered through an ambiguous lens, where the distinction between something natural and something supernatural is never entirely clear. It is characteristic of the world Wooff creates across Aleister, where folk tradition collides with gothic literature, northern landscapes brush against the occult, and deeply personal experiences sit alongside ancient mythology.

Before entering the studio, Wooff and producer James Wyatt disappeared into a tiny Welsh cottage called Popty (which also adorns the cover), carrying little more than a guitar and a handful of microphones. Snow, silence, and stone walls became collaborators of-sorts, and it was in that flush of seasonal isolations that the record's emotional temperature revealed itself—not through dramatic reinvention, but through subtle shifts in texture, restraint and space.

By introducing tape saturation, drones, vintage keyboards, orchestral flourishes and richly textured acoustic instrumentation, the new album’s production embraces and accentuates atmosphere. Pulling vivid inspiration from British and Irish folk recordings of the late sixties and seventies, without ever leaning into nostalgia. Wooff has developed a voice that feels wholly individual: rooted in traditional folk music, coloured by classic rock, and drawn irresistibly towards something dark and mysterious.

A proud Boltonian who grew up on the edge of the West Pennine Moors, Wooff continues to draw inspiration from the places of her home. That surrounding landscape permeates Aleister, winding its way through the songs, providing windswept imagery. Alongside her songwriting, Wooff is also a surrealist painter and the shared themes between her writing and painting overlap throughout the album; peculiar shapes and colours are conjured and burst into life.

“The setting encapsulated everything we wanted the new album to be and certainly influenced those early stages of the production process,” Toria says of that time. “We left Wales with a really strong idea of how we wanted the album to sound and took that vibe straight into the studio.”