Let’s get this straight: we love Constant Follower, and The Smile You Send Out Returns To You, released in February via Last Night From Glasgow, is further proof -if any were needed- of their talent and the heartbreaking beauty of their music.
Again, today, we find ourselves drawn into their quiet splendour, into their music that glides between chamber-folk and dreams (or nightmares?), with the release of a hand-made stop-motion film for Gentle Teaching (one of the highlights of the album -though, frankly, every song there is a highlight), animated by Tsumugi Yagi, a rising star in Japanese animation. We’re not talking digital shortcuts or AI trickery: no, just patient human hands. Tiny movements, captured frame by frame, hour into the wee small hours. Sets and puppets submerged in real water, trembling under the pull of sea and sigh of the Selkie myth (the half-seal, half-human of Scottish folklore, caught on land, yet imprisoned by memory of the sea, longing always for the tide) at the heart of the song.

What Stephen McAll say: “AI can now produce a track or film in seconds – and it can even make you feel something. I never thought I’d say that. For artists like me that’s an earthquake. If machines can do it faster and cheaper, what happens to the kids learning instruments, or the small crews making films? This collaboration with Tsumugi shows what human creativity can do. We need to value real music and real art like this, before it’s drowned out by digital noise.”

Tsumugi Yagi -only 22- is a rising voice in Japanese animation and is no stranger to subtle melancholy. Already the recipient of the Grand Prix at HAC2020 for Last Bit of Life, and the Young Creator Prize at the Wired Creative Hack Award in 2022, she brings to this film a status quietly rising, like foam gathering at the edge of a wave.
Her work is a reminder that analogue craft—patient, imperfect, human—still has power. At a moment when folk tradition and human-made art seem endangered by the cold efficiency of AI, Constant Follower and Yagi offer something restorative. A whispered defiance. A fragile hope.

The Smile You Send Out Returns To You was released in February 2025 via Last Night From Glasgow. Look HERE for more information on Constant Follower. Look HERE for more information on Tsumugi Yagi.