“People are going to ask, ‘Why did you spend so long making such a short record?’” concedes Fionn Regan. “But it feels like the idea for this record was in my head for a long, long, long, long time. Through all the other records — something that I’ve been evolving underneath.” It is indeed close to five years since Fionn Regan last released an album — 2012’s The Bunkhouse Vol I: Anchor Black Tattoo was the fourth record since his 2006 award-winning debut The End of History, filled with all the lyrical and melodic mischief, warmth and wonder inherent to Regan’s work. The record that heralds Regan’s return, The Meetings of the Waters, is perhaps his finest to date. It feels at once unlike any of Regan’s previous material, and at the same time lies a bedfellow or a bookend to The End of History; while it holds the same irresistible wit and poetic eye that characterised his debut, it has a new sense of musical exploration, wrapping the acoustic bones of his earlier records in a warm, inquisitive form of electronica. This record is not entirely something Regan went looking for; it is something that rose up as his eye was elsewhere, that led him in a different direction, picked him up and carried him to a new place. “I think with this record I feel like I’ve landed where I wanted to be,” is how he describes it.