To The Light Return is the third solo album from Rick Redbeard – the alt-folk alter-ego of Rick Anthony, best known as frontman of cult motorik indie-rock ensemble The Phantom Band and as one half of atmospheric gothic folk duo Afterlands. Released by Lost Map on December 4, 2026, it’s a luminous, unflinching and profoundly hopeful collection of songs about loss and change, family and renewal, the passage of time, and finding your way back towards the light.

Written in fits and starts across the best part of a decade, To The Light Return was shaped by a transformative period in Rick’s life encompassing marriage, fatherhood, moving away from Glasgow, the loss of his dad and, for a time, losing touch with music-making itself. His work with Afterlands helped rekindle that creative spark, giving him the impetus to return to these songs and complete what he describes as “the most personal set of songs I’ve ever committed to record.”

Recorded with producer and engineer Graeme Young (Idlewild, James Yorkston, Lost Map presents Weird Wave) at Rick’s childhood home in Aberdeenshire, the album brings together friends and family including Afterlands collaborators Davey McAulay and Jill O’Sullivan, Phantom Band drummer Iain Stewart, Rick’s folk-singer sister Josephine Anthony, and even his wife and young daughters. The surrounding landscape makes its presence felt too: garden birds can be heard on the recordings, singing from trees planted by Rick’s late father.

From the playful family folk of ‘Little Girl in a Lion’s Mane’ and the melancholically motorik ‘End of It All’, through the stark, churning ‘Big Dark’ and the joyful lullaby ‘W.A.L.K.I.N.G’, To The Light Return is Rick Redbeard at his most open and affecting. Closing with ‘Little Heart’, a beautifully clear-eyed love song about ageing alongside someone, it’s an intimate record about the strange push and pull of life’s middle years – what we lose, what we hold onto, and what might still be waiting for us up ahead.