It was an unlikely collaboration. When Caroline Polachek DM-ed These New Puritans in 2022, the American super popstar and Charli XCX collaborator just “had a feeling they were writing new music”. She was right.
“I told them how much their music meant to me,” Polachek wrote of the Southend-on-Sea hailing duo in an Instagram post this year. “And that I was at their service if new songs ever called for it. A year later we met up in the studio during the solar eclipse and I joined them on three songs.” The result was Industrial Love Song, a haunting love song about two cranes whose shadows never quite meet. Polachek’s trademark near-screams delicately complement the rough vocals from lead singer and songwriter Jack Barnett. Together, their voices twist together over the stripped-back sounds of a foreboding organ.
