The New Eves are rising. Signing to Transgressive Records, the Brighton quartet mark their much-anticipated return with furious new single ‘Highway Man’.
Launching for the jugular with sickle in hand and flowers growing at their feet, ‘Highway Man’ offers the band’s most compelling and cutthroat offering to date.
Landing at some haunted midpoint between Patti Smith, CAN and Buffy Sainte-Marie, and capturing all the elemental power of their magnetic live show, the single plates up one sinister banquet indeed: bone-sawing cellos and cranium-bashing drums; hypnotic bass hors d’oeuvres with a side of guttural fuzz-guitar improv; a main course of Nina Winder-Lind’s rasping-gasping vocal, sung like a last rite before a fatal voyage to the Underworld. The rawness of its construction, the confidence and clarity of each part, all culminate in a momentous headrush force and an inescapable sense of a prophetic, lawless doom which The New Eves will simultaneously subject us to and forsake us mercifully from.
Sticking true to the band’s oft-mined antiquarian influences, the lyric notably finds inspiration from English poet Alfred’s Noyes, reframing his 1906 work of the same title so that the titular character is less of a dickhead, and the ‘Landlord’s Daughter’ has actual agency: “In the original version it’s this dude, who’s being the dude, and the girl doesn’t do anything and then dies,” says Nina. “So I was like, ‘We can’t have that…’”
Photo by Katie Silvester
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