THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Crooked Wing is These New Puritans’ long-awaited fifth album — their first in six years. Produced by Bark Psychosis pioneer Graham Sutton and Jack Barnett, and executive produced by George Barnett, it features an unpredictable lineup of collaborators, from Caroline Polachek to veteran jazz bassist Chris Laurence.
The cult duo return with one of 2025’s boldest and most immersive records, shifting from the brutal to the beautiful. Crooked Wing cements TNP’s status as visionaries — defying genre, rejecting convention, and delivering their most moving, powerful work yet. “This album is both more surreal and somehow more direct than anything we’ve ever done,” says George. “A crooked wing is an ear, you have one on each side of your body, and they have a rippled shape. Maybe if you’re lucky they can help you fly.”
Reuniting with Sutton — who produced the band’s seminal albums Hidden and Field Of Reeds — on Crooked Wing the band worked extensively on the record’s detailed textures, but with cinematic breadth and scope. On a These New Puritans album, any one song can contain influences from jazz, electronica, classical, industrial music, hip hop, or surrealist inversions of classic crooned balladry, without any one being overwhelmingly obvious.
These are songs about machines, underground worlds, non-human love, light, the sea, death at its most specific and least general, cartoon characters crossing wastelands, and — ultimately — the fragility of small human beings against the whirring of gears and the clanking of chains. Pushing the beautiful up against the brutal, the lullaby with the cacophony, has always been These New Puritans’ way.”
