Dream is the Driver arrives April 17th 2026; eleven tracks of coastal psychogeography, care homes and pocket symphonies

Golden Samphire Band take their name from Limbarda crithmoides, a yellow-flowered coastal plant of the daisy family that colonises sea cliffs and salt marshes along the British coast. The trio consists of brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb and fellow Sussex coast resident Hannah Lewis; their debut album Dream is the Driver is released on April 17th, 2026 via Wayside & Woodland Recordings.

Title: Dream is the Driver
Artist: Golden Samphire Band
Release Date: 2026-04-17
Genres: Folk, Psych-folk
Label: Wayside & Woodland Recordings

The Hanscomb brothers previously recorded as Junkboy, and Hannah Lewis worked with them on Littoral States (2023), that project’s most recent album. The three have now formalised what was already a working unit under a new name, with a tighter focus: a home-recorded song cycle that keeps its eyes fixed on the stretch of coastline and downland they share, and on the mundane rituals that accumulate a life there.

The title track arrives via an unlikely relay. Rich Hanscomb‘s pen friend’s young son, writing from Yokohama, used the phrase “dream is the driver” to describe pictures of bullet trains he had drawn. Hannah Lewis picked up the image, municipal transport, trees flashing past, the sensation of moving toward something, and expanded it into a meditation on aspiration and creative agency in what the band describes as an “artless, screen mediated world.” There is something fitting about a song built around self-determination that begins with a child’s drawing sent across hemispheres.

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