THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: Nestled somewhere between primal rock ’n’ roll 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.”
They’ve now distilled this visceral energy into their extraordinary debut The New Eve Is Rising: A lightning rod of inspiration channelled by a quartet with the ability to create something greater than the sum of their parts. “This project has been about us redefining ourselves, and we hope anyone who’s listening can be inspired by that,” says Nina, as Ella nods: “We’re seeing how far we can go as four people by creating our own mythology.”
Musically it takes their untamed melting pot of musical styles — an instinctive, incendiary mix of Patti Smith radical poetry, rock ’n’ roll recklessness, freak-folk experimentalism and plenty more — and somehow turns it into a collection of clarion calls that you can still hum. It’s completely immersive; a whole world to dive into that’s taken on a life of its own. “We’re all adhering to The New Eve entity of the band,” Ella notes. “The band knows what it wants.”
Due Aug. 1, The New Eve Is Rising was written in Brighton and at an artistic residency at The Cornish Bank, and recorded at Rockfield Studios and Bristol’s Cotham Parish Church. Across its nine tracks are references to highwayman’s caves and 12th-century lovers Heloise and Abelard; to krautrock and Swedish cow calls and even lyrics whispered into a bat detector. The band call what they make Hagstone Rock. “There’s a lot of mythology around a hagstone, and it’s different in different places, but generally if you look through the hole of hagstone you can see the truth,” says Ella. “We see ourselves as a rock band, but there’s a lot of depth in there and putting hagstone in front of it felt better.” Pause. “It also has the word ‘hag’ in it, which we really identify with…”
“It’s the idea that you can do what you want — you don’t have to do things a certain way,” Nina says, summing up the revolutionary spirit of The New Eves and their debut. “When we made this band, we didn’t know what to expect. No one gave us permission. You have to do that for yourself.”
