Some albums don’t simply play; they arrive, like weather, like the scent of a place you haven’t seen in years but that still knows your name. Nurru WÄna - meaning “the scent of home” - belongs to that rare category. It’s the sound of five musicians approaching the idea of belonging from different corners of the globe and discovering, almost shyly, that their paths rhyme.

Hand to Earth is a meeting point more than a band. At its centre are the WÄgilak song traditions held and carried by Daniel and David Wilfred - voice, bilma, yidaki - elements that feel older than vowels, older than the idea of music itself. Around them orbit the breath-frayed clarinets and trumpets of Aviva Endean and Peter Knight, the lithe percussion and voice of Sunny Kim, and the patient electronics that Lawrence English pours like fog around the edges. The group formed years ago as a kind of ongoing conversation, and Nurru WÄna feels like a new chapter written with calm hands and hearts still a little raw.

The album was recorded mostly in Melbourne, mid-tour, during one of those rare days when travel stops pressing its thumb on the spine. Daniel Wilfred felt compelled to record songs tied to the Djuwapada songline, which traces a journey across Arnhem Land as a dreaming figure sings the world into being - birds, trees, seasons, all the way to the coast. You can hear this lineage in the directness of the performances: single takes, no hesitation, no dressing the words in unnecessary finery. It’s music as lived inheritance.

“Bush Honey (guku)” opens with a slow unfurling - voice and yidaki sketching a space that feels half ceremonial, half intimate. Electronics rustle in like a warm draft under a door. It’s gentle but carries the weight of memory. “Nurru WÄna Part I” brings Sunny Kim’s voice in counterpoint, singing lines by Korean poet Yoon Dong Ju. Her presence doesn’t blend with Daniel Wilfred’s so much as stand beside it, like two strangers walking the same trail for different reasons but finding comfort in the shared silence.

Across the record, the group’s approach is both structured and gloriously porous. “MÄdawk” and “Gadayka” carry the bones of traditional song with just enough electronic mist and brass shadows to suggest a world expanding - like someone adding new rooms to an old house without touching the foundation. There’s humour, too, buried deep: the playful swagger of “The Crow”, which was recorded in New York of all places, proof that even birds with mythic significance enjoy unexpected layovers.

What’s striking is how little the album strains for effect. There’s no cultural cosplay, no faux-mystical posturing, no cinematic swelling designed to explain emotions you’re already feeling. Instead, the pieces evolve the way natural things do: slowly, patiently, guided by the mood of the moment. The electronics aren’t there to modernize; they’re there to listen. The winds don’t elaborate; they respond. It’s a respectful, almost tender kind of collaboration - music where nobody seems interested in being the protagonist.

Thematically, Nurru WÄna hovers around displacement, longing, and the half-lit territory between where you’re from and where you’re going. But it never gets heavy-handed about it. Instead, the songs make you feel as if you’re carrying a memory you can’t quite name - warm, a little aching, with the faint taste of eucalyptus or salt on the air. It’s grief without despair, and joy without spectacle. The kind of emotional honesty that keeps its shoes on.

If there’s a lesson here - and there might be, though the album doesn’t insist - it’s that belonging isn’t a destination. It’s a practice, a call and response. A voice singing the land into being, and another voice answering from far away, surprised at how familiar the language feels.
Nurru WÄna doesn’t chase transcendence. It simply opens a window and lets the breeze in. And for fifty minutes, it smells a little like home, wherever you happen to be.