These New Puritans: “You want the feeling that it could all collapse any second”

The band’s frontman reflects on finding inspiration in the unexpected and using contrast as a creative tool.

These New Puritans’ first album in six years first started to take shape when Jack Barnett stumbled on an isolated Greek Orthodox Church. As the bells rang out, he was so struck by their melodic sound that he took his phone out to record them. This sound helped catalyse the creation of Crooked Wing, a sprawling, dramatic work replete with choir boy vocals and haunting organ lines. It’s ambitious and dramatic, mining grand themes of love, machinery and the cosmos. One offbeat, imaginative track imagines two industrial cranes falling in love with each other on a building site. Caroline Polachek lent her dreamlike vocals to it to create a balance between light and dark, and beauty and brutality, that is woven throughout the record. “She’s got such a beautiful voice that I could make my voice even uglier,” Jack says. 

To see These New Puritans perform it live is akin to a spiritual experience. Jack and his twin brother George are joined by a suite of instruments – including a pipe organ and a xylophone – played by their ever-rotating band. “You want the feeling that it could all collapse any second,” Jack says of their unconventional live set-up. “It’s not just something inevitable.”

Ahead of the band’s performance at Full of Lava festival, we caught up with Jack to talk about bringing the album to the stage, finding inspiration in film and collaborating with Caroline Polachek. 

The album started as hearing a bell in a Greek church. Why do you think you’re drawn to these religious sounds in your music?

Jack Barnett: Bells are an incredibly familiar but also alien sound. They’ve been around us for hundreds and hundreds of years, making these same sounds. They’re like the sea or the wind. They’re just there, but they’re also really alien to a lot of other sounds you hear, like other music, because they have all these complex harmonics in the sound that don’t relate to the scales we’ve invented in hearing proper music. They set off this whole other world and this other set of possibilities.

Are there any other found sounds that provoke the same feeling for you, or any others that have set off an idea in that way?

JB: We did an underwater recording on one album. With these recordings, it’s like you’re taking this thing and then you just get as many different sounds out of it as you possibly can. And then it can surprise you. It’s the opposite of getting a sample from a sample library, because if you do that, you know what you’re getting, and it can never defy your expectations. Whereas when you get the real thing in front of you, you get more chaos of the real world and real life. That’s much more fun. You get sounds you’d never expect. With a hawk in the garden, I was expecting to get his wings, but it was really quiet, and then you get all this other stuff like screeches and squeaky clicking sounds.

Is that chaos of real life something that you try to bring to your live performance?

JB: Yeah, I think you want the feeling that it could all collapse any second. It’s not just something inevitable. I always think part of your job as a musician is to disrupt everyone who seems to be very certain what they are, who they are, what they’re doing, how they work, but I try not to be one of those people.

You worked with Caroline Polachek on Industrial Love Song. How did that collaboration come about? Did you already know each other before?

JB: No, we just met up and played some music. We had the song and it needed vocals, and Caroline was really up for it. We spent a day in the studio and we did that song, Industrial Love Song, and sang that in a day. Then there’s another song called A Season in Hell where Caroline does these superhuman screams at the end of the song. It was fun. She’s got such a beautiful voice that I could make my voice even uglier, like Beauty and the Beast. 

Industrial Love Song is framed around two cranes falling in love. How did that image first take shape in your mind?

JB: I actually saw two cranes out the window when I was on the train from London to Essex. I just saw them and thought about two cranes on a building site in love. Then I thought, I’ll write a song around that. Then the image of the sun setting, and their shadows crossing each other, would be the main image. It’s quite a visual song, really. Once I had that image, it became like a duet. I sing the verses, and Caroline sings the chorus, and we sing it back and forth to each other.

Where did the title Crooked Wing come from? 

JB: George was really adamant that he wanted the word ‘wing’ in the title. He kept going on about it and sending all these pictures and references of these ancient sculptures and things and Hypnos, that God of dreams. I was going through different things I could join together with it, and crooked wing was just one of the words that we came up with. Somehow that felt right, because a wing could be a bit pompous. Somehow, crooked undermined it and made it this broken thing. It’s this little broken thing, rather than something magnificent that can lift you off somewhere.

You were selected by David Lynch to perform at the Manchester International Festival’s David Lynch Presents. Did you ever have any direct contact with him?

JB: No, but it’s nice in some small way to have been part of his universe. He’s one of those people where your mum knows who he is, and your friends know who he is. He’s one of those unifying figures, someone like David Bowie. 

There feels like quite a thematic overlap between your world and this Lynchian universe, like the industrial factories, being influenced by dreams and the juxtaposition of beauty and brutality. Has David Lynch always been a conscious influence for you? Or do you think it just seeped in through those early childhood memories? 

JB: Yeah, maybe it just seeped in accidentally. Contrast is a good thing in music or films. It can be the thing that gives momentum. Extreme dark and extreme light coexisting, seeing the little burst of light through the darkness. If you have something that’s this perfect vision, this perfectly beautiful object, it can be a little bit inaccessible or banal. If you’re in some fancy gallery and you see a beautiful painting, it’s one thing, but if you were just walking down the street and you just saw a beautiful painting by the side of the road, that might be something else that might be more powerful.

You’ve said you write music as if composing a film score. How exactly have film scores influenced your approach to creating music?

JB: I think the process of recording probably has more in common with recording a film score than recording as a band. It’s all written down as a score, and then we bring in different sections and different musicians to fill in the parts. I don’t really get inspired by other music. It would feel like too much of a distraction, so I quite like watching films because then you’re more naive or ignorant. I know a bit about music, so it’s better to get lost in something else you don’t really understand because it can make you feel more innocent and a bit more receptive to inspiration.

Are there any films in particular that have had that kind of influence on you?

JB: Last night I was rewatching The Pink Panther. I love that character. He reminds me a little bit of Colombo. People who are outsiders in this glittering, glamorous world that can disrupt and undermine and make it fall apart. I also like Buster Keaton slapstick. In our family, one of my great uncles was a slapstick comedian in Lambeth in the musical age so I think maybe that comes through…