Folk artist Anna Westin has dropped their new single "Incense Ascending" today.

The track comes with an acoustic performance filmed at Rosslyn Court in Margate. Westin said this about the new song:

”Incense Ascending was something quickly scribbled under the sounds of a neighbour’s upstairs row [argument]. There were often rows that could be heard through the floor, and this time it continued through the night. I was living on the edge of the park in a seaside town then, and there was a closeness to stuff, shouting on the streets, dog fights on the green, arguments above me when the bottles came out, and a general electric closeness to pain and tension of poverty, of living behind pay checks and trying to pay the heat. I felt like there wasn’t much I could do that particular night but hunker down and try to stifle the noise, but instead this song came, and I started writing it for the people I didn’t know and I did know - my neighbours and the people who passed me on the streets, and the county lines kids and the mess of the seaside town that I just kept trying to cover up. This was me trying to listen. I ended up playing it again when I was in the West Bank opposite the dividing wall, and that was of course something totally different, but there was that human pain there that I wanted to cover up again, and instead found myself trying to listen to.

When we recorded it, we had the idea of bringing something ancient to it - because that was really what it was about, that ancient human lament. So we recorded it, three of us vocalists, Ellie and Imogen and I, and we sang it like you would sing Gregorian chant, together, in an echoing space at Resort Studios, an amazing arts collective I was part of in an old brick building in Margate. We got up at dawn to record it, to avoid the drilling outside. The samples we recorded on our walks through Margate, the park, the sea, keys we found in our pockets. That was what I loved about it coming together. That somehow the lament was also connected to the kids laughing in the park, and getting out your keys to drive to work, and shuffling down the beach at dawn.”

"Incense Ascending" is the third and final single to be released from Westin’s forthcoming studio album LEV, which will be released on March 25. Westin’s new single is available on all digital services right now.