These New Puritans announce their hugely anticipated new album Crooked Wing, due for release on 23 May in multiple digital, CD and vinyl formats, via Domino.
Crooked Wing is the band's long-awaited fifth album - their first in six years. Produced by Jack Barnett and Bark Psychosis pioneer Graham Sutton and executive produced by George Barnett, it ranges from brutal to beautiful, and cements TNP’s reputation for visionary music that defies categorisation and convention. It features an unpredictable lineup of guest musicians such as Caroline Polachek and veteran jazz double-bassist Chris Laurence.
These New Puritans - Essex brothers Jack and George Barnett - are previewing the record with the double A-side single ‘Bells’ / ‘Industrial Love Song,’ both of which are available to stream and download now.
“Industrial Love Song is a duet between two cranes on a building site,” explains Jack Barnett. “Caroline sings the part of one crane, I sing the other; they can’t touch (their movements are controlled by the operator), but when the sun rises they hope that their shadows will cross. I like how the title George came up with misdirects expectations - it’s not that kind of industrial.”
“It’s hard to attach a time period to this song,” says George. “It’s progressive music made with instruments that have been around for hundreds of years.” “As we exit the mechanical age, you realise how much we have in common with our machines, how human they are,” continues Jack. “Suddenly it didn’t feel so absurd to write a love song from their perspective.”
Premiering today is a standalone music video by renowned artist and photographer Harley Weir and These New Puritans, soundtracked by ‘Industrial Love Song’; the band and Weir are longtime friends and creative collaborators.
Wacht the video for 'Industrial Love Song' here
Of ‘Bells,’ Jack says: “This song started with a field recording we made of a bell in a small Orthodox Greek church. You can hear it in the song, and the rest of the song grew out of it. That one bell strike set a lot of the album in motion.” Listen / watch ‘Bells’
“This album is both more surreal & somehow more direct than anything we've ever done,” says George. “A crooked wing is an ear, you have one on each side of your body, and they have a rippled shape. Maybe if you’re lucky they can help you fly.”
Crooked Wing began with the striking of a bell and it is ‘Bells’ that perhaps best conveys the album’s rich yet restricted sonic palette: organs, ancient bells and pitched percussion. The church organ - an “instrument of love and fear” says Jack, which has traditionally conjured both the celestial and the demonic - was all recorded in either Essex or Carinthia, Austria. ‘Bells’, with its phased rhythm evoking Steve Reich, Jack Barnett’s unaffected Thames Estuary croon, and nonlinear song structure, is some of the most startling and powerful music of the band’s recording career.
Reuniting with Graham Sutton - who produced the band’s seminal albums Hidden and Field Of Reeds - on Crooked Wing the band worked extensively on the record’s detailed textures, but with cinematic breadth and scope. On a These New Puritans album, any one song can contain influences from jazz, electronica, classical, industrial music, hip hop, or surrealist inversions of classic crooned balladry, without any one being overwhelmingly obvious.
These are songs about machines, underground worlds, non-human love, light, the sea, death at its most specific and least general, cartoon characters crossing wastelands, and - ultimately - the fragility of small human beings against the whirring of gears and the clanking of chains. Pushing the beautiful up against the brutal, the lullaby with the cacophony, has always been These New Puritans’ way.