These New Puritans

THESE NEW PURITANS ARE A BAND FROM ESSEX, ENGLAND,
COMPRISING BROTHERS GEORGE BARNETT AND JACK BARNETT,
AND AN EVER-ROTATING CAST OF COLLABORATORS
These New Puritans’ unorthodox and highly structured method has meant notating all of the music before recording in groups and as soloists (Jack taught himself to do so specifically for the album), before combining these. It is only then that the real work of deconstructing and rearranging the material can begin. It’s an approach that bears little relation to how a band is expected to work, part of an unorthodox practise that brings in classical ensembles, pop stars, conductors, video artists and more; this is a band equally comfortable making guest live appearances with sonic ex-perimentalists Nurse With Wound as remixing Björk or soundtracking for Hedi Slimane.

A little history. The Barnett brothers were born just two minutes apart in the Essex coastal city of Southend at the close of the 1980s. Their father worked as a builder, their mother an art teacher. At around 7 or 8 years old, the twins began playing music, graduating from plastic toy guitars and karaoke microphones to learning Captain Beefheart songs and recording on cheap four tracks in their early teens. One crucial and revealing hobby was slowing down the sonic pyrotechnics of Aphex Twin tracks, all the better to understand their vertiginous peaks and sudden, gurning drops frozen in slow motion.

After realising that forming a band was essential to getting gigs in and around Southend, an early version of These New Puritans was formed in the late 2000s featuring Thomas Hein and Sophie Sleigh Johnson. “We would drive up to London in our dad’s work van,” says Jack Barnett, “then in the same van go to work on building sites the next day.”
Debut album Beat Pyramid (2008) afforded the band a breakthrough. Its brittle post-punk (albeit with a dose of Timbaland-era pop) stood out amongst the relatively conservative musical landscape of the time, but what happened next was far more interesting. Most careers struggle to contain even one seismic direction shift: These New Puritans pulled off two in quick succession. Stark and confrontational, Hidden (2010) used Japanese Taiko drums, a children’s choir and the sound of sharpening knives to conjure their first masterpiece. It was NME’s album of 2010, at the same time praised by The Wire magazine and broadsheets for its sustained fusion of Benjamin Britten, JDilla and Diwali Riddim.