These New Puritans’ music has long since evolved beyond the scratchy post-punk of the band that inspired their name, but they do share an ideology with the Fall: that making music should be an all-consuming life’s work defined by perpetual renewal and hard graft. Brothers Jack and George Barnett conduct themselves in a way that borders on recklessness, toiling at art music characterized by lofty ambitions, meticulous production values, and zero concession to any commercial concerns—one thing for those with deep pockets, quite another for a pair of working-class autodidacts from the Essex coast.
But such creative risks are paying off. These New Puritans’ discography forms a remarkable arc—every album different, often containing the seeds of the next. Following a detour into romantic Berlin art pop on 2019’s Inside the Rose, Crooked Wing, their fifth studio album, revisits the terrain explored on 2013’s muted, neoclassical Field of Reeds. Again recorded with production assistance from Graham Sutton—once leader of British post-rockers Bark Psychosis, now a sort of unofficial third New Puritan—Crooked Wing presents carefully orchestrated chamber music as indebted to Benjamin Britten or Steve Reich as anything in the indie rock canon. The record is largely played on a suite of instruments—bells, piano, pipe organ, glockenspiel, and assorted brass—that have evolved little over decades, if not centuries. But These New Puritans are undeniably a modernist project, more concerned with forging their own aesthetic than indulging any nostalgic retread.
One of the secrets of the Barnetts’ success has been their skill at rallying others under their banner. On Crooked Wing, the guest list includes Caroline Polachek, who duets with Jack on lead single “Industrial Love Song,” and the actor Alexander Skarsgård, who appears in the video to “A Season in Hell.” But celebrity confers no special privilege in These New Puritans’ universe, and such star turns rub shoulders with a wider cast that includes the likes of Canadian soprano Patricia Auchterlonie; Chris Laurence, a septuagenarian double bassist with a decades-long list of credits across British jazz and classical music; and Alex Miller, a 10-year-old member of Southend Boys Choir. Miller’s voice—at once fragile and powerful, naive and curiously ageless—is the first thing we hear on Crooked Wing, on the opening “Waiting,” and also the last, as that song’s lyrics are reprised on the closing “Return.” He is accompanied by an organ recorded at St Mary’s and All Saints Church in Stambridge, an instrument once played by the Barnetts’ grandfather—another suggestion of the way These New Puritans’ music seeks to collapse time, mingling the ancient and the contemporary.
