Amsterdam-based Turkish psych purveyors Altin Gün mine the catalog Anatolian legend Neşet Ertaş for the source material on their new album, Garip, which will be released Feb. 20 through ATO Records.
Ertaş penned hundreds of songs and recorded more than 30 albums from 1957 onwards and is revered for updating the ashik folk tradition for modern listeners. He died at the age of 74 in 2012, six years after being awarded the State Medal of Distinguished Service by the Turkish Grand National Assembly.
More from Spin:
- How a Still-Defiant Shepard Fairey Turned Punk Rock Attitude Into 30 Years of Activist Art
- Repelican’s Jon Ehrens Ponders the Cosmos
- Roland Gift on ‘She Drives Me Crazy,’ Which is Not a Song He Would Save in a Shipwreck
“Both of my parents are from Turkey, from the same area he is from,” Altin Gün’s Erdinç Eçevit says of Ertaş. “It’s the music that I grew up with. When I was five, six years old, my grandfather always had cassettes by Neşet Ertaş and I used to listen to it all day long. Then, I was too young to really understand the lyrics and the meaning, but I really liked the melodies. [They’re] stories about what he’s facing in life. The Turkish traditional music is the blues of the Turkish people.”
A video for lead single “Neredesin Sen” can be seen below. Garip also features collaborations with the Stockholm Studio Orchestra and will be supported by a 2026 European tour, beginning Jan. 31 in Maastricht, Holland. It’s the follow-up to 2023’s Aşk, which debuted at a career-best No. 4 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers chart and No. 15 on the Top Independent Albums tally.
Part of Altın Gün’s appeal is that its music can be thoroughly enjoyed even if the listener can’t understand a word of Turkish. “That’s what I like about our music,” bassist Jasper Verhulst, who is a longtime fan of the Anatolian genre but is far from fluent in the language, previously told SPIN. “It’s very universal, I guess, even though it’s exotic. Apparently, it still speaks to a lot of people.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
