These New Puritans come with a reputation of making Joy Division look like S Club Juniors. An unfair one, but this is what happens when you combine challenging hymnal music with brutally intense electronica. And ultra-brooding photos with a sporadic release schedule which suggests many years of wrestling with the fabric of music itself, experimenting with cutting up and pasting musical notation and tapping into obscure found sounds, in an existential hunt for sounds no human has ever made before. Which is pretty much exactly happened with their new, and fifth album, Crooked Wing.
It’s their first in six years, and apparently brothers Jack and George Barnett recorded it at a studio near an industrial waste processing centre, and made field recordings in a hidden Greek Orthodox church and another in rural Essex, and compared all the patchwork of sounds and ideas like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, organised it, notated it, then deconstructed and probably then put it all in a blender and drank it.
