These New Puritans Field of Reeds 2LP

These New Puritans' third album - an internal monologue - the harmonic world opens up and becomes the focus. Their only album to credit a glazier. In between the reed nodes, where the stars are hiding. Alternative title: Island Songs.

Even These New Puritans' most stark numbers, while often lacking a concrete backbeat or definitive structure, are bursting with details and ideas. Ambient textures, constructed from melancholic horns and eerie analog synthesizer tones, add a wavering undercurrent that is often hair-raising and haunting. The production is equally unconventional. After writing the material in Essex and Amsterdam, Jack Barnett fleshed out the parts with his brother George and Tom Hein before recording in London, Gloucester, and Berlin with new honey-voiced Portuguese singer Elisa Rodrigues, utilizing an unusual magnetic resonator piano and meticulously detailing the songs with field recordings, including breaking glass and the screaming of an actual hawk. This perfectionism, present in the sonics and in the complex arrangements, makes Field of Reeds the most challenging title in their catalog and also the most groundbreaking.