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‘We put all of life into the mincer’: These New Puritans on their kaleidoscopic new album
Adored by Björk, Massive Attack and Elton John, the cult avant-popsters are back with an album that takes in everything from Greek church bells to Ukraine. We meet the Barnett twins among the Southend amusement arcades
The result was 2010’s acclaimed album Hidden, which provided the blueprint for future These New Puritans records, fusing the propulsive battle-rap-meets-Beefheart rhythms of Beat Pyramid with the pointillism of Steve Reich and choral arrangements of Benjamin Britten, who loved the east of England coastline as much as Jack. With its wide-eyed Edenic feeling, Crooked Wing nestles back into the same territory as the band’s masterpiece, 2013’s Field of Reeds – an album that riffed on the intensity of Jack’s internal world as well as Essex’s beguiling islands – rather than the slick, propulsive, Berlin-penned Inside the Rose, which came out in 2019. So you have to be prepared to take a massive financial hit.” Luckily Domino, home to Arctic Monkeys and Wet Leg, snapped up the finished album: a series of songs that seemingly sit outside of time, sounding like both the future and the past.
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