Ghosts litter Drinking Songs.

The damned drowned, dying soldiers, innocents packed onto a train before it explodes; there’s not a note on Drinking Songs that isn’t haunted. Released 20 years ago this year, Drinking Songs marked a foundational shift in Matt Elliott’s life. He abandoned his work in the drum & bass group Third Eye Foundation and found a different way to pedal dread. Elliott composed using a morass of phantom vocals, nylon guitar, off-kilter piano, wailing horns, and a pervasive sense of doom. His vision was a dour bar in some Eastern European barony, where the patrons haven’t realized they’re already dead.

20 years on, Elliott has returned to Drinking Songs with a live, recomposed version of the original tale, the specters of the damned as lively as they were two decades ago. We talked to him about the best drink to pair with the album, the death of innocence, and the false promise of futurism on The Woodhouse.