Brighton-based four-piece The New Eves – Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mager (bass, vocals), and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals) – today release ‘Cow Song’, the latest single from their anticipated debut album, The New Eve Is Rising, arriving August 1 via Transgressive Records.  

A song born from an improvised jam and recorded partly in a field with a cow named Bonnie, ‘Cow Song’ explores themes of liberation, landscape and wanderlust. Inspired by the Swedish pastoral tradition of kulning – a powerful female-led vocal technique used to call cattle across the mountains – the track sees the band lean into their own vocal power with haunting, elemental force. 

The band explains here: “’Cow Song’ was a song about big mountainous landscapes and the longing to enter them, to simply walk off, to wander. It is also a herding song. The rhythm felt like you were walking with animals, or more precisely, with cows. In Sweden (and other countries) there is a very old tradition of walking your cattle to a ‘summer farm’ (fäbod) in the mountains. This was a job for the women and girls only and they would stay with the animals in the mountains all summer which created a very special bond between them, the animals, and the landscape. There is a big and very exciting musical tradition surrounding this practice. The women would use a special vocal technique called ‘kulning’ to communicate with each other and with the animals across the mountains. It’s a very beautiful thing and it’s loud! This inspired us to use our voices in a new and bigger way. We allowed ourselves to be loud and that was liberating in many ways.

“A very special thing about this song is that the first part was actually recorded in a field- being sung to a cow named Bonnie. You may be able to very faintly hear her mooing. She lives at Rockfield in Wales where the majority of this album was recorded.”