Current 93

If A City Is Set Upon A Hill is the 2022 album by Current 93, the group around David Tibet. It followed The Light Is Leaving Us All from 2018, and the label says it took three years to make. It is a slow, twilit record built on piano, violin and guitars, with electronics kept low in the mix. Tibet recites more than he sings, and the songs feel close and unguarded.

Tibet wrote the words and mixed the album with Andrew Liles, who also plays electronics, guitars and keyboards. Alasdair Roberts adds guitars, autoharp, synthesizer and backing vocals. Reinier van Houdt plays Fender Rhodes, piano and guitar, and Michael J. York brings pipes, whistle and duduk. A violinist, a second pianist and singer, and a player of drone tones complete the ensemble. The title comes from the Akkadian omen series šumma ālu, whose opening line Tibet renders as "If a city is set upon a height". His note in the booklet is dated Hastings, 25 September 2021. The cover reproduces Delft tiles from a private collection, all showing Cain killing Abel.

The seven songs are numbered in Roman numerals, and the title is split between the first and the last. The opening If A City... sways slowly over a halting piano figure, the keys leaving long spaces between Tibet's lines. The Child, And Fire stays close to bare piano, with soft harmonies moving underneath. The closing ...Is Set Upon A Hill starts from an eerie electronic intro that gives way to a slow, stumbling guitar. Across the album, themes and phrases come back in new arrangements, so the record plays as one long, connected piece.

The single If A City... was released with a film by Davide Pepe on Christmas Day 2021. Reviewers heard the album as intimate and sorrowful. The writer of Only Death Is Real described its sound as "a tender mixture of acoustic instrumentation" set against electronics. In Freq, Michael Rodham-Heaps heard "a beautiful sadness scenically torn from the English Countryside" and named The Child, And Fire as a favourite.

CD edition, one disc in a four-panel card sleeve with a six-page fold-out booklet of lyrics, released on 11 March 2022 by House of Mythology in its HomAleph series (HOMALEPH 5).