These New NEW Puritans

These New Puritans’ new album ‘Hidden’ sauntered into my inbox a few months ago as an online stream. It wasn’t meant to be sent to me, it was some kind of mistake on the record label’s system. Anyway, oblivious to the fact that I really wasn’t supposed to be hearing it yet, I popped my headphones on and managed to get through 5 booming, stomping, cinematically expansive pieces of music, Tweeting as I went, until I was told DEAR GOD HALT!!! by their PR. In retrospect, the secret and mysterious the way I heard it first was quite apt. I didn’t listen to this album again and got distracted by some other albums that physically landed on my desk. Until Niall got sent the real CD copy in the post and we put it on and - oh mother of god – my eardrums trembled with a glee/fear hybrid.

Back when I first began this job, one of my very first tasks was to interview TNP’s frontman Jack. After doing a bit of research I realised that this band aren’t exactly blabbermouths; which isn’t a terrible thing, as it makes you work harder and get a more interesting feature in the long run, but for a 21-year-old, slightly scared music journalist doing her first phoner, it’s not exactly ideal. I can’t find this transcript anywhere on my computer, I probably deleted it in shame, but I found the finished article, here are two quotes I used:

“These New Puritans singer Jack claims to know nothing about contemporary music, cites only Captain Beefheart as musical inspiration and admits to coming from ‘the most boring place in the world’.”

‘”I’m sure there are lots of rubbish bands; I’m sure there are lots of good ones, but we only really listen to the music we make’.”

I think what you can get from this Ones To Watch piece is that he just didn’t fancy chatting about their music at all, for whatever reason. It could have been that he was shy, or that he felt it would be belittling to their songs to categorise them. Either way, I sort of forgot about this band, probably erased them from my shameful interview memory, so I didn’t expect their second attempt to completely knock the socks off anything else I’ve heard that’s out in 2010 so far.

‘Hidden’ will no doubt get tonnes of critical acclaim, and I’m really intrigued to see if this curious band will unravel some more about themselves to the media, who will probably throw all sorts of comparisons and similarities around after hearing this captivating album. When they first arose, TNP were thrown into a sub-nu-rave category due to bad timing and lazy post-Klaxons genre lumping. Although their debut garnered them much attention from the stern and earnest muso’s around, this intriguing new album will no doubt fling the elusive group into a puzzling category all of their own.