These New Puritans – George Barnett (l) & Jack Barnett (r) today announce their hugely anticipated new album Crooked Wing, due for release on 23 May in multiple digital, CD and vinyl formats, via Domino.
Crooked Wing is the band’s long-awaited fifth album – their first in six years. Produced by Jack Barnett and Bark Psychosis pioneer Graham Sutton and executive produced by George Barnett, it ranges from brutal to beautiful, and cements TNP’s reputation for visionary music that defies categorisation and convention. It features an unpredictable lineup of guest musicians such as Caroline Polachek and veteran jazz double-bassist Chris Laurence.
Pre-order / pre-save Crooked Wing
These New Puritans – Essex brothers Jack and George Barnett – are previewing the record with the double A-side single ‘Bells’ / ‘Industrial Love Song,’ both of which are available to stream and download now.
“Industrial Love Song is a duet between two cranes on a building site,” explains Jack Barnett. “Caroline sings the part of one crane, I sing the other; they can’t touch (their movements are controlled by the operator), but when the sun rises they hope that their shadows will cross. I like how the title George came up with misdirects expectations – it’s not that kind of industrial.”
“It’s hard to attach a time period to this song,” says George. “It’s progressive music made with instruments that have been around for hundreds of years.”
“As we exit the mechanical age, you realise how much we have in common with our machines, how human they are,” continues Jack. “Suddenly it didn’t feel so absurd to write a love song from their perspective.”
Premiering today is a standalone music video by renowned artist and photographer Harley Weir and These New Puritans, soundtracked by ‘Industrial Love Song’; the band and Weir are longtime friends and creative collaborators.
Of ‘Bells,’ Jack says: “This song started with a field recording we made of a bell in a small Orthodox Greek church. You can hear it in the song, and the rest of the song grew out of it. That one bell strike set a lot of the album in motion.”
“This album is both more surreal & somehow more direct than anything we’ve ever done,” says George.
“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.”
Crooked Wing began with the striking of a bell and it is ‘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 nonlinear song structure, is some of the most startling and powerful music of the band’s recording career.
Reuniting with Graham Sutton – who produced the band’s seminal albums 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.
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.
These New Puritans
Crooked Wing (WIG553)
- Waiting
- Bells
- A Season In Hell
- Industrial Love Song
- I’m Already Here
- Wild Fields (I Don’t Want To)
- The Old World
- Crooked Wing
- Goodnight
- Return
About These New Puritans
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.
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).
Following Field Of Reeds was Inside The Rose (2019), a deliberately direct and even romantic album that pared back its predecessor’s orchestral scale 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.
The cult duo return with one of 2025’s boldest and most immersive records, shifting between the brutal and the beautiful. Crooked Wing cements These New Puritans’ status as visionaries – defying genre, rejecting convention, and delivering their most moving, powerful work yet.
