These New Puritans Tickets at The Workmans Club

The Barnett brothers were born just two minutes apart in the Essex coastal city of Southend at the close of the 1980s. Their father worked as a builder, their mother, an art teacher. At around 7 or

8 years old, the twins began playing music, graduating from plastic toy guitars and karaoke microphones to learning Captain Beefheart songs and recording on cheap four tracks in their early teens. One crucial and revealing hobby was slowing down the sonic pyrotechnics of Aphex Twin tracks, all the better to understand their vertiginous peaks and sudden, gurning drops frozen in slow motion.

After realising that forming a band was essential to getting gigs in and around South-end, an early version of These New Puritans was formed in the late 2000s featuring Thomas Hein and Sophie Sleigh Johnson. “We would drive up to London in our dad’s work van,” says Jack Barnett, “then in the same van go to work on building sites the next day.” Debut album Beat Pyramid (2008) afforded the band a breakthrough. Its brittle post-punk (albeit with a dose of Timbaland-era pop) stood out amongst the relatively conservative musical landscape of the time, but what happened next was far more interesting.

Most careers struggle to contain even one seismic direction shift: These New Puritans pulled off two in quick succession. Stark and confrontational, Hidden (2010) used Jap-anese Taiko drums, a children’s choir and the sound of sharpening knives to conjure their first masterpiece. It was NME’s album of 2010, at the same time praised by The Wire magazine and broadsheets for its sustained fusion of Benjamin Britten, J Dilla and Diwali Riddim.

But just as Hidden was winning acclaim, something quickly changed. Field Of Reeds (2013) was yet another startling left turn, a grand and cinematic reverie built on complex woodwind, brass, strings, choir and deep bass vocal arrangements - and a record-ing of a harris hawk. It was once again widely acclaimed, and led to a 2014 tour with a 35 piece orchestra which took in Paris’ Pompidou Centre and London’s Barbican (later released as Expanded: Live at the Barbican).

Today, it is easier to understand these left turns and the band’s mercurial outsider status as part of a longer, visionary tradition that includes Coil and late period Talk Talk, even Robert Wyatt. These were all quasi mystical artists who ploughed the hidden seams of the landscape and worked solely to their own private clock.  “It’s very English what we do,” says George, who says that not being easily explainable has been a double-edged sword to These New Puritans, “it’s the grit in the pearl.”

Following Field Of Reeds, Jack Barnett spent a period living and working at a former East German radio control centre in Berlin. The result was Inside The Rose (2019), a deliberately direct and even romantic album that pared back its predecessor’s orchestral ambitions to something more propulsive and shimmering. The band were hand-picked by David Lynch for an appearance at the Manchester International Festival’s David Lynch Presents event. Then, just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic, These New Puritans debuted The Blue Door at The Barbican, an audio-visual performance with scaffold and silk sculptures by George, centred on Inside The Rose with an expanded percussion ensemble. Plans for an international tour of the show were put on ice.

In 2025, with the genre-defying Crooked Wing, These New Puritans continue their utterly committed and maverick career with their most moving and powerful release to date.