The back story is almost too neat. Beckett, best known as one half of the indie-folk duo Red Trees, which he formed with Lou Richards in 2006, learned about the climate crisis over thirty years ago and, by his own account, has been carrying the weight of it ever since. Late in 2025 something gave way. The songs came in a rush, and the result is less an album than a release valve. Lesser artists would have turned that urgency into a lecture. Beckett has made a love letter instead, and it is a far more devastating thing.

It helps that the record never raises its voice. There are no sermons here, no stadium-sized pleas, no hectoring. Beckett works in the hushed register of a man talking to someone he trusts, and the intimacy is almost uncomfortable at first, like overhearing a private conversation on a quiet train. Then it becomes something else entirely: an invitation. We are not being told what to feel about the natural world. We are being shown what it looks like when somebody simply loves it, and loses sleep over it.

The title is the album's manifesto in miniature. A greyhound, a fern, a swallowtail, an apple tree: no grand abstractions, no "the planet" or "the environment", just four specific, living, fragile things, set side by side like objects on a windowsill. The greyhound is Lilly, Beckett's own dog and the record's gentle muse, and her presence runs through the album like a warm hand on the shoulder. There is something quietly radical in that. Beckett understands that nobody ever mobilised for an ecosystem, but plenty of us would walk through fire for a dog, or a butterfly in the hedgerow, once we have really looked at it.

The music has the unforced, tumbling quality of work captured while the feeling was still hot. There is a sense of songs arriving rather than being assembled, with the rough edges left on, the way you leave the soil on a freshly pulled carrot. Beckett, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, plays the arrangements with the instinct of someone following a thought rather than a plan, and the result is music that breathes, wanders and occasionally catches itself mid-sentence. Those who prize polish may find it unvarnished. Those who prize truth will hear nothing else.

If there is a lineage here, it runs through the great English pastoral tradition, from the quiet melancholy of Nick Drake to the weathered tenderness of Richard Dawson's gentler moments, but Beckett is no mere inheritor. His sadness is a contemporary one, shot through with the specific grief of knowing exactly what is at stake. Yet the astonishing thing, the thing that lifts this from a good record to a necessary one, is how little despair it contains. Grief and gratitude are bound together so tightly that they become the same emotion.

*greyhound / fern / swallowtail / apple tree* is art therapy that has the grace to double as art. It is a record about attention, about noticing the small, the green, the four-legged and the winged while there is still time, and about the stubborn, necessary act of loving what we may yet lose. Put it on, ideally with a dog at your feet and a window open, and let it do its quiet work.

Beckett has spent thirty years holding his breath. It was worth the wait for him to let it out.