posted: 2024-03-31 Climate of Hunter Scott Walker

“This is how you disappear,” sings Scott Walker at the opening of Climate of Hunter, as if explaining his trajectory from 1960s teen pop star to author of flinty curios like this. Scott’s opening quartet of songs – brooding, angular, dystopian – on the final Walker Brothers album, 1978’s Nite Flights, had little precedent and, coming six years later, little predicts Climate of Hunter but those four songs.

Occupying a haunted no-man’s land between post-punk, prog and plainsong, the deep blue blanket of Walker’s voice curls around elusive, allusive lyrics that hint at meaning but often seem to exist simply as games played with sound. Unexpected guests Billy Ocean and Mark Knopfler (he and Walker shared a manager) are subsumed in the music’s obtuse majesty. What followed was 12 years of silence, until 1995’s magnificent Tilt. Climate of Hunter remains an enigmatic and frequently magical record; something both to puzzle and marvel at.

David Peschek, The Guardian