‘Crooked Wings’: A haunting mix of brutality and beauty by these new puritans

These New Puritans 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.

“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.”

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.