Hailed as “a masterpiece” by Time Out, selected by Uncut as their Album Of The Month and 7 years later included in their list of the 150 Greatest Albums Of The Decade, Regard The End became a cult classic album upon its release in 2003. The most immediate thing about the album is the sheer, bloodied power of Fisher’s voice. Like a colossal centrifugal force, everything else spins around it. In its untethered shift stage centre, it both defined an entire mood and ushered in depths of feeling, rendering much of their back catalogue at the time almost anaemic in comparison. A point of major departure was Fisher’s delving into traditional folk forms, informed as much by Celtic/European folk as the turn-of-the-century rusticity of Greil Marcus’s “old, weird America”. Ultimately, Regard The End was a quest for truth, an attempt to uncover life’s harshest lessons however tough, however unpalatable, often armed only with personal faith as the difference between salvation and the abyss. It became the first Willard Grant Conspiracy album to truly immerse yourself in. In ditching most of their traditional band ethic, they tapped into the finest folk gothic traditions of death, suffering, misery and hardship and fashioned a paradoxically uplifting, transformative record of extraordinary power.