If there was an instrument I’d lock away in Room 101 it’s the ukelele, that scratchy little four-stringed guitar so beloved of hipsters. Yet I’ve always had a soft spot for Zach Condon.

He’s one of the very few rock musicians who uses one as his primary instrument, and pairs it with the sound of a colliery brass band.

So far so strange.

I first encountered Zach, who performs under the stage name Beirut, headlining End of the Road festival in 2011 and fell in love with his mournful yet exuberant brand of music, his melancholy vocals enhanced by the celebratory sounds of a French horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba and euphonium.

This is his first new music for four years following persistent throat issues that forced him to cancel the end of Beirut’s Gallipoli tour in 2019 and question whether he would ever be able to play a live show again.

Zach comes from Santa Fe in my favourite US state of New Mexico and created his new album in a small cabin in a remote place called Hadsel in the far north of Norway, where the sun rarely rises above the horizon.

“I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me,” he says. “The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”

He composed thes songs on the organ in the town’s early-19th-century wooden church before taking them home to Berlin to finish the album, playing all the instruments himself – chiefly his baritone uke, French horn, modular synths, and a variety of drums, shakers and other percussion instruments.