Essex Serpents

Southend siblings' dark, daring and brilliant fifth.

- Shaun Curran

These New Puritans
Crooked Wing

The fifth album from art-rock experimentalists These New Puritans is bookended by the startling sound of a 10-year-old boy soprano, chosen from the Southend Boys' Choir near the Essex hometown of the band's twin brothers, Jack and George Barnett. Soaring above a dramatic, ever-rising church organ, on opener Waiting he sings of ominous images ("I am buried/I am deep underground/I am faraway/I am toiling in subterranean fields") as ghostly effects and bells clang above; by reprise closer Return, the sound is chillier, weirder, vaguer. It's evocative, unnerving, unexpected but oddly beautiful; the sort of aesthetic that These New Puritans have maintained over 15 years no matter what their latest type of leftfield artistic reinventions.

Few predicted These New Puritans' career arc. While 2008 debut album Beat Pyramid showed much more invention than their Fall-inspired post-punk peers, it was 2010's Hidden that proved the band's quantum leap. Ambitiously, unfathomably melding electronics, hip hop and dancehall beats to bassoons, Japanese taiko drums and wielding swords, it was a dark, highly original masterpiece. For 2013's Field Of Reeds, they recast as an austere neoclassical ensemble with woodwind, brass, bird-samples, Portuguese Fado singing and oceanic silences, with stunning results. 2019's Inside The Rose was the first album that had roots with its predecessor, their version of elegant alt-pop submerged in rich electronics and orchestration. All the while there were echoes of Talk Talk, Steve Reich, Benjamin Britton, Bjork and Radiohead, but These New Puritans became their own entity, a complex band impossible to second guess.