These New Puritans

Das sagt der/die Künstler:in:

THESE NEW PURITANS / CROOKED WING

THESE NEW PURITANS ARE A BAND FROM ESSEX, ENGLAND,

COMPRISING BROTHERS GEORGE BARNETT AND JACK BARNETT,

AND AN EVER-ROTATING CAST OF COLLABORATORS

Ring the bells: the brothers are back.

Crooked Wing is the fifth album by These New Puritans and their first new studio album for six years, produced by Jack Barnett and longtime collaborator and Bark Psychosis 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 surrender. 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.”

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 Orthodox 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 another 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 sandwiched between this and a couple of vigorous Evangelical churches - Sundays were certainly 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 unassuming Essex origins.

“Music should flow out of your life, it shouldn’t be a separate activity” 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 unorthodox 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 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 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 contain 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 misdirection, 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 aggro 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 thrilling 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 cacophony, 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, graduating 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 Southend, an early version of These New Puritans was formed in the late 2000s featuring ThomasHein 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 relatively 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 Japanese 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 complex woodwind, brass, strings, choir and deep bass vocal arrangements - and a recording 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 status 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 double-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 orchestral ambitions to something more propulsive and shimmering. The band were hand-picked by David Lynch for an appearance at the Manchester International Festival’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 performance 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 utterly committed and maverick career with their most moving and meditative 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.