Foggy Notions presents
THESE NEW PURITANS
Nov 10th
The Workmans Club
Foggy Notions presents the acclaimed These New Puritans for their first
Irish show in seventeen years this November.
THESE NEW PURITANS ARE A BAND FROM ESSEX, ENGLAND,COMPRISING BROTHERS
GEORGE BARNETT AND JACK BARNETT, AND AN EVER-ROTATING CAST OF
COLLABORATORS
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Ring the bells: the brothers are back.
Crooked Wing is the fifth album by These New Puritans and their first
new studio al-bum for six years, produced by Jack Barnett and longtime
collaborator and Bark Psy-chosis pioneer Graham Sutton, as well as
featuring guest appearances from an eclectic and unpredictable cast of
collaborators, from Caroline Polachek to veteran British jazz double
bassist Chris Laurence.
The new album, by the enduring and singular cult experimental duo, is
set to be one of 2025’s most striking and original releases, one that
rewards deep immersion and sur-render.
Sonically it ranges from the brutal to the beautiful, and cements TNP’s
reputation for visionary music that defies categorisation and
convention.
“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.”
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The album began with the striking of a bell. “I had to walk through a
very long and winding gorge to reach it,” explains Jack Barnett of the
small and isolated Greek Or-thodox church, which he encountered by
chance. Thinking little of it, the band’s vocalist and principal
songwriter made a field recording – field recordings have long been part
of his practice. In fact, as he states today, “that one bell strike set
much of the album in motion. It suggested a set of pitches, which led to
a song, and another song, and anoth-er song.”
Back in London, the duo began honing tracks from dozens and dozens of
ideas at Jack’s studio. “It’s like a vision of Hell, a Bosch painting,
just this ginormous rubbish dump,” describes Jack of the industrial
waste processing facility next to which he lived and worked, “there’s
bits of trees, cars, kids’ toys, just all this dirt and filth
everywhere. Every broken remnant of life you can imagine.” These New
Puritans’ unit was sand-wiched between this and a couple of vigorous
Evangelical churches – Sundays were cer-tainly interesting – and it
became imperative to counterbalance the bells and classical
instrumentation with something loud enough to cut through the cacophony.
“We’ve always had that balance between the sublime and the filth”, notes
George.
It is no great revelation that there have been long pauses between TNP
albums. Why? The brothers half-joke about it being a protest against the
overabundance in modern music, or a deliberate process of artificial
scarcity.
In fact, in These New Puritans’ case it is a red herring for a workrate
that is intensive, continuous and entirely DIY. This is a legacy, one
might speculate, from their unas-suming Essex origins. “Music should
flow out of your life, it shouldn’t be a separate ac-tivity,” says
George of their method, “Jack just doesn’t stop working.” While their
sound can perhaps be deceptively sophisticated, they are entirely
self-taught.
Since 2010’s Hidden, These New Puritans’ unorthodox and highly
structured method has meant notating all of the music before recording
in groups and as soloists (Jack taught himself to do so specifically for
the album), before combining these. It is only then that the real work
of deconstructing and rearranging the material can begin. It’s an
approach that bears little relation to how a band is expected to work,
part of an unor-thodox practise that brings in classical ensembles, pop
stars, conductors, video artists and more; this is a band equally
comfortable making guest live appearances with sonic experimentalists
Nurse With Wound as remixing Björk or soundtracking for Hedi Slimane.
One notable appearance on Crooked Wing is the boy soprano, whose voice
opens and closes the record (on ‘Waiting’ and ‘Return’ respectively.) He
was recorded in another remote church, this time in the stark landscape
of their home county Essex, with its sprawling marshes, mudflats,
concrete industry, and austere, isolated beauty.
It’s the track ‘Bells’ that perhaps best conveys the album’s rich yet
restricted sonic pal-ette: 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 non-linear song structure, is some of the most startling and
powerful music of the band’s recording career.
Reuniting with Graham Sutton – who produced 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 con-tain influences from jazz, electronica,
classical, industrial music, hip hop, or surrealist inversions of
classic crooned balladry, without any one being overwhelmingly obvious.
It was during work on Crooked Wing that Caroline Polachek got in touch
with TNP. “I was driving around Mallorca listening to the demos,”
remembers George, “and Jack happened to have a song that basically had a
demo vocal sound that sounded eerily like Caroline’s voice.” This became
‘Industrial Love Song’ which, in a thrilling bit of misdi-rection, does
not come out of the harsh and transgressive sonic tradition but is in
fact a romantic ballad from the perspective of two cranes on a building
site. “The result sounds electronic or superhuman, but it’s 100% her
natural voice,” says George, “it’s incredible how she could do that.”
The same can be said for George’s drumming. On ‘A Season in Hell’, the
stuttering ag-gro drums that were a feature of earlier These New
Puritans releases such as Hidden contrast sharply with the album’s
otherwise heavenly quiet – it’s one of the most thrill-ing moments on
Crooked Wing, as it climaxes to an orgasmic screamed vocal.
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 ca-cophony, has always been These New Puritans’ way.
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A little history. The Barnett brothers were born just two minutes apart
in the Essex coastal city of Southend at the close of the 1980s. Their
father worked as a builder, their mother an art teacher. At around 7 or
8 years old, the twins began playing music, grad-uating from plastic toy
guitars and karaoke microphones to learning Captain Beefheart songs and
recording on cheap four tracks in their early teens. One crucial and
revealing hobby was slowing down the sonic pyrotechnics of Aphex Twin
tracks, all the better to understand their vertiginous peaks and sudden,
gurning drops frozen in slow motion.
After realising that forming a band was essential to getting gigs in and
around South-end, an early version of These New Puritans was formed in
the late 2000s featuring Thomas Hein and Sophie Sleigh Johnson. “We
would drive up to London in our dad’s work van,” says Jack Barnett,
“then in the same van go to work on building sites the next day.” Debut
album Beat Pyramid (2008) afforded the band a breakthrough. Its brittle
post-punk (albeit with a dose of Timbaland-era pop) stood out amongst
the rel-atively conservative musical landscape of the time, but what
happened next was far more interesting.
Most careers struggle to contain even one seismic direction shift: These
New Puritans pulled off two in quick succession. Stark and
confrontational, Hidden (2010) used Jap-anese Taiko drums, a children’s
choir and the sound of sharpening knives to conjure their first
masterpiece. It was NME’s album of 2010, at the same time praised by The
Wire magazine and broadsheets for its sustained fusion of Benjamin
Britten, J Dilla and Diwali Riddim.
But just as Hidden was winning acclaim, something quickly changed. Field
Of Reeds (2013) was yet another startling left turn, a grand and
cinematic reverie built on com-plex woodwind, brass, strings, choir and
deep bass vocal arrangements – and a record-ing of a harris hawk. It was
once again widely acclaimed, and led to a 2014 tour with a 35 piece
orchestra which took in Paris’ Pompidou Centre and London’s Barbican
(later released as Expanded: Live at the Barbican).
Today, it is easier to understand these left turns and the band’s
mercurial outsider sta-tus as part of a longer, visionary tradition that
includes Coil and late period Talk Talk, even Robert Wyatt. These were
all quasi mystical artists who ploughed the hidden seams of the
landscape and worked solely to their own private clock. “It’s very
English what we do,” says George, who says that not being easily
explainable has been a dou-ble-edged sword to These New Puritans, “it’s
the grit in the pearl.”
Following Field Of Reeds, Jack Barnett spent a period living and working
at a former East German radio control centre in Berlin. The result was
Inside The Rose (2019), a deliberately direct and even romantic album
that pared back its predecessor’s orches-tral ambitions to something
more propulsive and shimmering. The band were hand-picked by David Lynch
for an appearance at the Manchester International Festi-val’s David
Lynch Presents event. Then, just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic,
These New Puritans debuted The Blue Door at The Barbican, an
audio-visual perfor-mance with scaffold and silk sculptures by George,
centred on Inside The Rose with an expanded percussion ensemble. Plans
for an international tour of the show were put on ice.
In 2025, with the genre-defying Crooked Wing, These New Puritans
continue their ut-terly committed and maverick career with their most
moving and powerful release to date.
“For me it’s an article of faith,” says Jack of the band’s defining
mission, “that if you do your own thing, you’ll find your place. You’re
running a different race to everyone else then you’re guaranteed to win
it.” The brothers are back: ring the bells.
