Hallelujah Trial Releases 'ON EACH BRANCH' Ahead of Debut Album
Tom Roberts and John Canning Yates recorded the vinyl-only LP at Gustav Adolf Church on Park Lane.
Hallelujah Trial released their first single on Friday 28 August. 'On Each Branch' is four minutes of voice, guitar and piano recorded inside a Scandinavian seamen's church on Liverpool's Park Lane, and it opens a debut album that arrives on 17 October.
The band is Tom Roberts and John Canning Yates. Roberts has led Cranebuilders and Beatowls. Yates founded Ella Guru, the Liverpool collective that earned a Peel session. The two of them knew each other for twenty years before they played a note together, then met over a pot of tea in a front room with no plan and no band in mind, and kept meeting until there was a repertoire.
In April they carried the songs half a mile down Park Lane to the Gustav Adolf Church and recorded there in residency. No reverb was added to the record. The building did that. Yates produced and mixed, Jason Mitchell mastered, and 'On Each Branch' was the first song Yates sent back to Roberts with piano on it.
The album is pressed in a single edition of 250 copies on 180g vinyl, and there's no repress. A second single follows before release. The album itself won't be streamed.
It comes out on Saturday 17 October, and that evening Roberts and Yates play it in the church where they made it, doors at eight. Ninety copies are set aside for that room and handed over by hand on the night.
The Single
'On Each Branch' · 4:16 · released Friday 28 August 2026
Written by Tom Roberts and David McDonnell
ISRC UK3K52688001
The Album
Hallelujah Trial · VIO-088 · Saturday 17 October 2026
250 copies, 180g vinyl. Vinyl only, no repress.
Produced and mixed by John Canning Yates
Mastered by Jason Mitchell
Sleeve by Pascal Blua, after 'Of the Rose', William Turner, 1568
The Launch
Gustav Adolf Church, 138 Park Lane, Liverpool L1 8HG
Saturday 17 October 2026, doors 8.00pm
Gustav Adolf Church, Park Lane, April 2026
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