Six years is a long time between records, but These New Puritans – Essex-born brothers Jack and George Barnett – have always worked at their own pace, with a steely-eyed disregard for trends.
Their previous album, Inside the Rose, also resulted from a six-year gestation process. The band exists outside the current musical climate to a large degree, showing unwavering focus on the bigger artistic picture.
With Crooked Wing, their fifth and perhaps most audacious album to date, they return not with a bang, but with something stranger, subtler, and more unsettling: a deeply textured soundworld that shudders under the weight of machinery, memory, and melancholy.
Like its title suggests, Crooked Wing is…