Nearly four years on from their debut gig in Brighton, having built a steady fanbase across the UK, four-piece rock outfit The New Eves have released their debut LP, The New Eve Is Rising. It’s a cohesive deep-dive into their world, both in sound and concept, and makes an impactful statement about their place in the world.
Who is The New Eve? She rises “from the pages of a burnt Bible”, eats a lot of fruit, and lets the juice and blood run down her naked body without an ounce of shame. She’s a rebellious, primordial spirit with a deeply embodied yearning for freedom. All this is set out in the album’s opener, ‘The New Eve’, a feminist manifesto delivered like slam poetry over a pulse of increasingly dissonant electric guitars and strings.
Over nine songs, The New Eves tell their versions of Genesis, Mary’s life before Jesus, and Alfred Noyes’ classic poem ‘The Highwayman’ from the perspective of the landlord’s daughter. They’re adamant that these women were fucking and eating baked beans as well as being wives or love interests. It’s feminism, yes – but feminism is only one part of a larger world-vision that unspools over the rest of the album.
The New Eves present a detailed, carefully-considered perspective of the world that they apply to everything from agriculture to ancient astronomical instruments. They’re obsessed with the past; their pool of references is firmly set between the birth of Christ and 1947. As Ella Oona Russell (drums) says: “… it’s political in a really different way. It’s about animals and rocks and it’s so much bigger.” On the six-minute ‘Cow Song’, we hear kulning, a Swedish cow call – projecting your voice across the cattle fields to communicate with animals and other shepherdesses. It yearns for nature and reconnection; the song’s central image is of being alone atop a mountain, home behind you, with nowhere to go but onwards.
The band’s sound draws from folk, punk and rock, but feels cohesive throughout. The songs’ sound worlds complement their subjects nicely, often using repetitive, ritualistic instrumentation that foreground lyrics (‘The New Eve’, ‘Mid Air Glass’). It’s reminiscent of everything from Patti Smith in its poetry-dense lyrics to Bikini Kill in its punk feminism. ‘Volcano’ opens with a beautiful, bluesy, perfectly slow ‘60s rock vibe, a lone flute trilling over the top, and closes the album with the lyric: ‘Let it breathe, set it free.’
A refreshing, original and inventive debut, The New Eve Is Rising lays the ground for an exciting future for The New Eves. They have firmly marked their place in the indie rock landscape, and I look forward to seeing what they create next.
The New Eves: Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Holly Sewell
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