Album Review: Crooked Wing by These New Puritans

Fifth album from Southend brothers Jack and George Barnett sees them once again reconcile their contrasting musical interests into one impressive, cohesive artistic statement We last heard from These New Puritans back in 2019 when they released fourth album Inside The Rose, an impressive work which sounded ancient and yet modern. Fifth album Crooked Wing confirms that this sense of temporal duality is once again very much at the heart of the music of Southend brothers Jack and George Barnett. Their ability to reconcile and merge their contrasting musical interests into one cohesive artistic statement has always been one of their biggest strengths, and it's very much in evidence on their latest offering.

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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.

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What's immediately shocking about the new These New Puritans record is the absence of any great shock. For a band whose whole existence has been defined by instrumental about-faces, Crooked Wing and 2019's Inside the Rose makes for a stunningly logical jump; for once feeling like a sharpening rather than a total shift. Bells, for instance, feels like it could well have sat on that previous record, but has had any fat stripped away, and is all the richer for its sparseness.

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One of the strengths of These New Puritans is how the expressive vulnerability of Jack Barnett's vocals sit within the battering of twin brother George's drumming. In this relationship, I've always heard a dance of the aggression and softness of masculinity, something that's reinforced on their fifth album Crooked Wing by how it begins and ends with the full yet delicate voice of a treble voice from Southend Boys Choir. As the years have passed since I first saw what was then a fourpiece rattling away in tiny London venues, this dynamic has only become more pronounced.

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These New Puritans' London studio is situated by both a giant industrial waste processing plant and several Evangelical churches, and this physical space finds itself manifested in sonic form on the Southend-born brothers' fifth full-length and first of this decade: filthy and heavenly, decaying and resplendent. It enjoys titling between these dichotomies: 'Bells' is rapturous, making gorgeous use of the titular instruments, and 'Industrial Love Song' is heavenly, using its guest turn from Caroline Polachek to crisp, emotionally potent effect. And while the majority of the record takes in these bright, soulful moments, there are also standouts to be found among its darker turns.

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