Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
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.
Speaking of his collaboration with the group, Alexander Skarsgård told Vogue: “Of late, I’ve been feeling a growing desire for a palate cleanser—to do something light and fluffy that would be fun for the whole family to watch.” To be clear, this seems to be a joke, although I’d hesitate to describe Crooked Wing as dark, difficult, or even particularly serious (can any album that features a song about two lovestruck cranes on a building site be said to lack humor?). The Barnetts’ arrangements are beautiful, if not quite pretty; their beauty is generally of the stark and striking kind—the sublimity of a windswept coastline or an iceberg. With its soprano swells and soft peals of French horn and flugelhorn, “I’m Already Here” glows with a sense of spiritual uplift. The extraordinary “Bells,” meanwhile, shows off a quiet mastery of minimalist technique, lacing chimes and pianos into competing pulsations. Every few bars, a new layer or slight change in emphasis subtly shifts the music’s current, and when Jack’s voice swoops in afresh over a lattice of twinkling glockenspiel and vibraphone towards the track’s close, the effect is majestic.
But it seems to be an article of faith for These New Puritans that beauty should coexist in a yin-yang balance with ugliness and violence. “Wild Fields (I Don’t Want To)” has a purgatorial air, pondering a fall from grace over thudding percussion and growling bass. Similarly cursed is “A Season in Hell”—a hark back to the territory of Hidden’s “We Want War.” The melody is a wild spiral of organ, the hook a harsh rat-tat-tat of snare, and Jack conducts the song as a tense chant, spitting out lyrics of medieval brutality. Speaking about the track, he likens it to Imaginary Prisons, a series of etchings by the 18th-century Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi that depict human suffering on an exploded, fantastical scale—another echo from the past that feels uncomfortably familiar from our vantage point in the present.
Jack’s vocals have never sounded better than they do on Crooked Wing. Once a surly mumbler, he’s since molded his voice into something softer and richer—not quite so tutored as the sopranos and chorists that he’s enlisted to accompany him, but human in the way it strains at the high notes. It is in his nature to be cryptic, though. Crooked Wing’s lyrics frequently explore the imagery of landscape. He sings of rivers and oceans, dark subterranean chambers and rolling fields of snow. Other times, he invokes the language of religion—the deserted paradise of “I’m Already Here” or the “angel with bloodstained wings” summoned on the title track. Even laid out on the page, the lyrics feel opaque; they often feel like cyphers concealing some esoteric meaning.
Crooked Wing promises to be a career highlight, then doesn’t quite deliver. Its first half is consistently astonishing, but its final third dips a little too far into the cryptic and lugubrious. The weary chorales of “The Old World,” or “Goodnight,” a moody ECM-ish jazz with curiously scrambled vocals, lack the overt beauty or spikiness that characterises the album’s best moments, and give the album the sense of a slow, extended fade out. Still, Crooked Wing is an achievement, both as a stand-alone statement, and another point in their journey. Its craft and discipline hint that their arc may yet rise higher.
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De La Soul’s tenth studio album is built around a steady and unwavering mission: to honour the life and legacy of founding member David Jolicoeur (also known as Trugoy The Dove) after his heartbreaking death in 2023. Speaking with NME earlier this year, MC Posdnuos remembered what Jolicoeur’s family told them at the funeral: “If y’all stop, Dave stops. We’re not putting necessary pressure on you, but we would love to see y’all continue on.”
The fact that De La have not shared a release since their Grammy winning 2016 album ‘And The Anonymous Nobody’ makes it clear that they only speak when they have something meaningful to offer. With so many layered emotions around grief, reflection, and legacy rising to the surface, this moment feels right for such a powerful return.
Drawing together an impressive gathering of talent, including iconic hip-hop figures like Nas, Slick Rick, Q-Tip, Pete Rock, Black Thought, and DJ Premier, all acknowledged in an extended opening roll call, Posdnuos and Maseo aim to craft an experience that fully pulls you in. With poetry and spoken word woven throughout, sweeping orchestral touches, and a clean, grounding narration from actor Giancario Esposito, ‘Cabins In The Sky’ attempts to capture the long process of facing Jolicoeur’s absence while firmly insisting on his lasting presence, expressed through lines like “When its Pos and Maseo you see, the magic will always remain three” (‘YUHDONTSTOP’).
One of the album’s most emotional moments arrives on ‘Different World’, which features poet Gina Loring and showcases some of Pos’ most exposed and heartfelt writing to date. Blending internal rhymes with a gentle flow that pulls you along, he shares: “Hard for me to cry, ‘cause I’m thankful… steering us through right and left turns / What we earn is another angel on our side.”
It is important to recognise that this album is not weighed down solely by sorrow or sentimentality. Instead, it stays grounded in the reality of the world we are living in now, offering plenty of new and outward-looking thoughts. On ‘YUHDONTSTOP’, Posdnuos reflects, “There’s high stakes being played around the world, and it’s understandable to be rooted in the present,” while also speaking honestly about De La’s place in contemporary American culture: “Some young ones don’t think we got that edge… Telling us ‘you a pioneer’ means you have American Pie nowhere near you.” Elsewhere, ‘A Quick 16 For Mama’ brings a tribute to the love and sacrifice of mothers alongside Killer Mike, and ‘Just How It Is’, which explores the story of a woman betrayed by her partner, highlights the deeper empathy and insight that maturity has given Posdnuos.
While De La Soul’s reflections on society are sharp and clear, the heart of this project belongs to David Jolicoeur and the space he has left behind. By examining the deep influence he had on their lives, both personally and creatively, the remaining members of the group shine a light on his essential contribution to American hip-hop and show exactly why they continue to be celebrated as some of the culture’s most cherished voices.
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