The first new music released since their acclaimed debut album, The New Eve Is Rising, ‘Red Brick’ slowly builds the tempo with scything lyrics and urgent drums before evolving into The New Eves’ signature howl. ‘Whale Station’ is unique and poetic in nature, with winding stream-of-conscious lyrics. Both songs were entirely created by women – from the songwriting, performance, production and engineering to the mixing and mastering.

Speaking about ‘Red Brick’, The New Eves said: “’Red Brick’ began whilst we were recording our album at Rockfield Studios. After 9 days recording we had finished the album and were really riled up, so we used the studio to jam, leading to the intro of ‘Red Brick’. It took a while for us to revisit it but we did just as Violet been working on a poem about our trip to New York and she just started saying it all over the music. Everyone was like, what the hell was that. It’s a breakthrough song for us because it lead the way out of our album and into new territory. Violet gets her space to run wild and Nina gets her first go at playing lead guitar. In hindsight it’s very fitting how Transgressive called us up and suggested recording this single so soon after the album, just like how it was written. It felt mental at the time, to go into the studio a week after the album release, but it was very cathartic to be immediately capturing songs after the marathon that was the album. ‘Red Brick’ is the first song of something new.”

Speaking about ‘Whale Station’, they said: “’Whale Station’ began last summer as an inspired jam in a little house in the Swedish countryside. Ella started reading words from this book called ’Whale Nation’ and it was almost like she was speaking in tongues. It had such a fervour to it, we were all out of breath at the end. The jam lay dormant for a while, almost a year. When we were asked about a b-side for red brick we got the idea to record it. We were sad when we got told we couldn’t use the words from the book but in the end it proved to be a good thing. We all went into nerd mode and very quickly made the lyrics for the song, although it still wasn’t quite a song, more like a spine of one.

“Coming into the studio we didn’t have a set plan or structure and that was kind of the whole point. We wanted to make something mainly improvised and see what would happen. Marta who produced the session was really on board with this and facilitated our ideas in an amazing way. We recorded most of it live. The song knew what it wanted to be and we followed.”

The post The New Eves release double single ‘Red Brick’ / ‘Whale Station’ appeared first on She Makes Music.

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.”

The post The New Eves share new single/video ‘Cow Song’ appeared first on She Makes Music.

‘The New Eve’ acts as something of a manifesto: an atmospheric incantation and an open door into their world. “The New Eve is of earth / Granite, ochre, magma, dirt / All the bones in her body are holy / All the stones in her pockets are homely”. There is a defiance there, but it’s one that’s open to all. The band said: “The poem was written by Nina in her family’s cabin in the Swedish mountains. It’s about us. It’s for our younger selves. It’s about everyone. It’s for anyone. It’s a song to be played very loud and to run away to, or rob a bank to, and march and dance and laugh. In a way it’s a love song. It’s an ode. And a glorious battle cry.”

‘Rivers Run Red’, says Ella, started life “as this weird little song that Violet could do some dancing to”. An early Halloween version found them singing Patti Smith lyrics while Violet poured blood on herself on stage; now, it’s a fully-fledged New Eves song with flutes, mesmeric, circular bass lines and a Velvet Underground-esque type of hypnotism. The track even features a matchbox, shaken by Kate.

“The initial lyrics are a poem written by Ella when she was a teenager. It was never intended to be a final part of the song, it just happened to be something she knew by heart whilst we were jamming. She actually wrote an alternative poem which inspired Kate’s lyrics later in the song, but in the end we went back to the teenage poem as that’s what everything had grown from in its strange chaotic way. This whole song was kind of an accident and because of that it’s had so many incarnations and has taken us to new places, like Nina’s ‘disco cello’ and Violet’s camping cup percussion debut. Now we love it.”

The New Eve Is Rising:

1. The New Eve
2. Highway Man
3. Cow Song
4. Mid-Air Glass
5. Astrolabe
6. Circles
7. Mary
8. Rivers Run Red
9. Volcano

The post The New Eves announce their debut album, The New Eve Is Rising. Two tracks out now: ‘The New Eve’ & ‘Rivers Run Red’ appeared first on She Makes Music.

Co-produced by the band with Joe Jones and Jack Ogborne (Bingo Fury), ‘Highway Man’ is a darkly-energised, female-first retelling of Alfred Noyes’ classic 1906 romantic poem. Urgent and intuitive, it’s a blistering slice of controlled musical chaos that flips the lens. “In the original version it’s this dude, who’s being the dude, and the girl doesn’t do anything and then dies,” says Nina. “So I was like, ‘We can’t have that…’”

Speaking of the video, director ALFRED said: “’Highway Man’ felt like such an offering from The New Eves. The trust and willingness for us to experiment and explore such a variety of visual languages allowed us to springboard to such an interesting place.

“We wanted to let the track tell its story, and our film to exist somewhere between the real and surreal – flowing from one moment to another with each frame being its own moment that breathes so much life.

“It was such a collaborative process from top to bottom – everyone knew the goal and contributed to making every moment hit its mark.”

Nodding to the fervent, captivating delivery of Patti Smith, with incantational backing vocals and a collective sense of driving, cantering rhythm, the newest track from the boundaryless quartet puts their rock’n’roll side to the fore. There’s a wild purge of a guitar solo courtesy of Violet (“It was when I first started to find my guitar style, which is basically just weird noises and bashing,” she says), and notes of krautrock, freak-folk and more. But, as with all things The New Eves do, the energy of ‘Highway Man’ comes truly from the unique alchemy of the four musicians playing together: receptive and reactive to whatever manifests in the room.

The post The New Eves release new single/video ‘Highway Man’ appeared first on She Makes Music.