FEATURE: Spotlight: The New Eves — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

The New Eves

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I am focusing on…

this Brighton-based band, The New Eves. They are currently in the middle of a run of in-stores and live dates. Go and catch them if you can. Formed in 2021, The New Eves consists of Violet Farrer, Nina Winder-Lind, Kate Mager and Ella Oona Russell. Their album, The New Eve Is Rising, was released on 1st August. I will end with a review of that album. I shall get to some recent interviews soon. However, here is some more details about a band that definitely need to be in your mind:

“Nestled somewhere between primal rock’n’roll live performance and transcendent ritual, there’s an unmistakable alchemy that happens when Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mager (bass, vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals) step onto a stage together. It’s a boundless, uninhibited kind of magic that feels completely new; that’s writing its own rulebook for how to exist - as a band, as women, as humans in the world - from the ground up.

“The space we go into when we perform feels quite far away from regular life. It takes a lot out of us and we really go into this other dimension, so it’s amazing that we can bring people there with us,” says Ella. “The live show is what’s got us everywhere - we had barely any music out, it was all so underground, but people just wanted to come and they’ve never stopped coming”.

Published back in May, Rolling Stone UK spoke with the band about, among other things, their anticipated and extraordinary forthcoming album. I am new to The New Eves but I know that they are going to have a very long future. You can just tell! Everything on The New Eve Is Rising is instantly memorable and original! A band forging their own path and releasing music that will endure for many years:

“Your debut album, The New Eve Is Rising, encompasses your whole story from your formation until now – can you tell us about how you have developed in that time?

Kate: When we started writing the first songs, we didn’t really know whether we were going to even like play shows or do anything. We weren’t planning for them to be in an album, but once we thought about making an album, it just made so much sense to for it to encompass the whole first chapter of us as a band.

Violet: [All the songs] work together regardless of which one’s older and which one’s newer. It’s not that we haven’t like advanced, but they all go together, and they’re all just us.

Nina: Are we more refined? No, we’re not more refined. Are we more assertive? Ah, we were very assertive at the beginning!

Kate: Every time we write a new song, we look into a slightly different place, but, like the others were saying, it all just seems to fit together. That’s what always amazes me. We go from such a different angle but somehow it still fits together. We’re like, ‘How does this work?!’ But it just does.

If this album is presenting the band’s first era, what do you think are the hallmarks of The New Eves so far?

Nina: There’s a real honesty about this body of work – this is literally what just came out of us, whether we wanted it or not. What do you guys think?

Kate: We don’t have this direct comparison of what the next chapter ais nd what’s different about it. There is something really great about all of this stuff just coming from us without having that feedback of people listening to it and defining what it is for us. It’s very free in that sense, and anything that comes afterwards will partly be an interaction with that.

Nina: It’s very honest and it’s very confident, in the way that a child is really confident. Maybe we didn’t really know what we were doing all the time, but in some way, we really, really, really did know what we were doing and we did it, and this stands as proof of that.

You’ve said you want to create your own mythology as a band – can you explain that?

Kate: It feels like the right way to properly announce ourselves to the world by putting out an album rather than an EP. There are quite big differences sometimes between the songs and the themes that any one of them on their own feels like it misses out this other part of what we are. The album doesn’t necessarily have a story that runs throughout it, but it does say something as a whole thing that you can’t do with just one song. We really felt it was really important to do that.

Nina: It was parallel to the songwriting process. One of us will have read a book and we bring it in, nd then it ignites something”.

In July, The Line of Best Fit chatted with The New Eves. This literary Punk-Folk group are conjuring magic and urgent music that is sending them into uncharted territory. A sound that, once experienced, becomes addictive! They are one of the most impressive new groups I have encountered in many years:

“Brighton has been both a creative incubator and a bit of a challenge for the group. They describe the scene as unusually supportive. “It’s a really nice container to grow in,” flautist and drummer Ella Oona Russell explains, “but you could pay £500 for a cupboard,” she adds, only half joking. It’s a place that forces bands to get resourceful, something The New Eves have turned into an art form.

From the beginning, their creative process has been less about planning and more about giving the songs a space to reveal themselves. “Most of our material we make together in the same room,” Winder-Lind explains. “We’ll have a jam and things will happen… between us in the space.” You can hear that looseness in the album: some tracks spiral and churn like spells being cast, others unfurl more slowly, drawing you into their world rather than pushing for attention.

They call their sound Hagstone Rock – an appropriately mythic label for music that references 12th-century lovers, the Bible, and highwaymen’s caves, while also pulling influence from krautrock, Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, and the accidental grandeur of DIY shows. It gives the music a timeless quality. They are not loyally revisiting these old stories but instead doing something more like rewilding them. Take their song “Highway Man”, for example: a reimagining of Alfred Noyes’ 1906 poem, warped into something darker, stranger, and freshly feminist.

The band’s audiences are a mix of the devoted and the unexpected. Despite the distinctly feminist current running through The New Eve Is Rising, they’re quick to point out that the atmosphere is anything but exclusive. “Even though there is this big feminine element,” Russell says, “it’s actually very open and inviting.” Winder-Lind agrees: “We’ve had young boys come up to us like, ‘Wow.’ That’s really cool! It makes me really happy that it’s not such a closed group.”

Despite their growing following, the band are keen to connect with one group in particular: “We want to get to the teenagers,” they laugh. “We do have a TikTok now, but none of us have really ever been on it.” Russell adds, “I’ve literally never seen what TikTok looks like. It feels like too much!”

What emerges in conversation with The New Eves is that this is not a band trying to define themselves, but instead determined to explore. “This chaos,” Winder-Lind says, “it’s coming out because it needs to come out.”

“We’re going into the future,” Russell says. “It’s going to be different. We’ve been making all this music for such a long time without much public engagement… we really have no idea what to expect.”

And yet, the momentum feels inevitable. The New Eve marches on – somewhere under a hand-stitched banner, frayed at the edges, proudly DIY, and all the more powerful for it”.

Before getting to a review of The New Eve Is Rising, I want to highlights part of an interview with DIY. Since they released their debut single in 2023, they have enjoyed this incredible rise. With their debut album out, they are expanding their horizons and are capturing new fans and followers. A group that you most definitely need to follow:

“Accordingly, whether it be photography, painting, or their tailored, cottagecore-leaning apparel, the group place equal importance on an array of artistic mediums. As these practices already play a huge role in their individual selves, Kate explains, “it would be hard to keep [them] out of what we’re doing.”

Given that many of the band’s visuals are set against strikingly provincial, quintessentially British backdrops, it feels appropriate that they chose the rural Wye Valley’s iconic Rockfield Studios to record most of their debut album. “We weren’t in London, and there was no outside noise. If you needed some space, you went up in the hills,” Nina details. “We all had our own rooms with our own bathtubs - it was incredible.”

Those who have caught The New Eves in concert will likely attest that the finished recordings stay very true to their live counterparts - something that Nina notes was “really important for us”. Continuing, she explains: “Because that’s kind of where the magic happens - when we play together in a room.”

Whether delighting in the fraught, bristly propulsions of ‘Highway Man’, or losing oneself in ‘Astrolabe’’s droning strings and primal incantations, the journey to the enigmatic heart of the band truly begins with the album’s powerful opener and pseudo-title track, ‘The New Eve’. Challenging religious, societal and gender conventions with captivating poetic conviction, the song is a goosebump-inducing portal into their world. “There’s middle-aged men who have had an incredible experience listening to that song,” Nina shares. “It revealed itself in a mystical way: I made a painting called ‘The New Eve Is Rising’, and then a bit later I wrote that poem, and then we did the song.”

The chord-striking boldness of these lyrical expressions in the context of the band’s all-female lineup has led many to brand The New Eves as ‘feminist’. However, they make clear that their relationship to the term is actually much more complex and far-reaching than the label leaves space for. “It’s like when we get called a ‘female band’,” Nina tells us. “I think it’s very, very simplifying and sometimes a bit patronising when someone [says] ‘oh, you’re a feminist band’. I think we need a different language around these things. Right now, we have these terms like ‘feminism’ and ‘female’, and they’re still very present in our language, but I feel like it’s shifting. We’re on the edge of something.”

The last year has well and truly been a whirlwind for the group, from their signing to Transgressive Records, to bagging slots supporting Black Country, New Road and YHWH Nailgun. “It’s crazy - we haven’t actually had that much time to look back and feel proud, because it’s been so busy,” Nina admits. It may be mile-a-minute at the moment but, to their audiences, The New Eves undoubtedly make a lasting impression - one which, they hope, will inspire people to “feel something they haven’t felt before, and do something they haven’t done before”.

Before rounding off, it is worth including a review for The New Eve Is Rising. It has won a lot of praise. And it is easy to see why! I have said this about a few recent albums, but I do think that The New Eves’ debut album could be in with a shout of inclusion on the Mercury Prize shortlist this year. The Guardian commended a band with a scent of The Velvet Underground and a mix of “trad folk, anarcho-punk and hippy whimsy”:

“Something of the Raincoats’ rickety post-punk explorations seem to haunt its sound, albeit relocated from Notting Hill to a more pastoral setting. So does the lo-fi avant-garage rock of the early-80s Fall, which is audible amid the simple riffs and relentless drumming of Highway Man. There is occasionally a bleating quality about the vocals that automatically summons the ghost of Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan. Equally, at their most full throated, they recall the powerful but ascetic harmonies of folk family the Watersons. When the vocals tend to spoken word declamation – as on opener The New Eve – you might think not only of Patti Smith but those moments in Crass’s oeuvre when the microphone was ceded to Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre.

And yet, if there are plenty of artists other than the Velvet Underground whom you could compare the New Eves to – from trad folk to distaff anarcho-punk to hippy whimsy – the band’s central point still stands. Whatever ingredients went into the recipe, the result doesn’t ultimately sound like much else, and there is often something rather thrilling about being in its presence. The weird blend of glam drums, sawing strings and folky vocal roar on Cow Song, for example. Volcano’s slow surge from gentle fluting bucolia to a potent sense of menace. The moment on Rivers Run Red when the scrabble of strings and guitars dramatically finds an urgent percussive shape.

It’s given an extra frisson by the fact that, whatever the circumstances of its recording, The New Eve Is Rising sounds as if it’s being played live, by a band who prize immediacy over virtuosity, with all the teetering potential for disaster that suggests. There’s a certain white-knuckle intensity to the moment when Circles shifts its rhythm, and given that the change is counted in with such vociferousness, perhaps it hasn’t always come off in the past.

Said disaster never strikes, although you do occasionally wonder if something may have been lost in translation from live show to studio, despite their best efforts. The spoken-word manifesto of The New Eve probably feels more viscerally powerful delivered in front of your eyes than it does coming out of your speakers. But the moments when the album doesn’t quite work are tempered by the sense that this is a band still in a state of flux and progress, working out where they might go next – the “rising” in the title seems the operative word – rather than a perfectly finished product with all of the doubts about how to move on which that would entail. That the New Eves are overflowing with ideas is obvious from their interviews and their debut album alike. The latter presents them in rough hewn and occasionally chaotic style: it feels exciting, as does their future”.

Do go and check out The New Eves. Genuinely a band who can endure for decades, they have the talent to rank alongside the very best of the best. The next few years are going to be very busy and exciting for the group. The New Eve Is Rising is an album you need to hear now. This amazing quartet are more than worthy of…