Search - These New Puritans :: Hidden

As their name suggests, These New Puritans are a group on a very precise mission. Hailing from England s Southend-On-Sea, and consisting of Jack Barnett, his twin brother George, Thomas Hein and Sophie Sleigh-Johnson. They first came to prominence with their 2008 debut album, Beat Pyramid. Urgent, pared down, sharp as a stick, it was hailed by the NME as demonstrating a span of ideas and singularity of vision that simply shouldn t happen to 20 year olds. They ve created their own imperfect world. And so they did, but this was not a band that was spent after completing their first album but one who were only just beginning to unpack their ideas. The evidence of that is in the form of their new album, Hidden, a work so extraordinary in its range, ambition and clarity of purpose as to defy overall comparison with anything you have ever heard. It s an album which pulls together a host of unlikely influences the later, more developed work of Steve Reich, with whose interlocking rhythms Jack fell in love with, Britney Spears, Japanese percussion and, in particular, the great British composer Benjamin Britten. These New Puritans have constructed an imaginarium whose contents are of less importance than the way in which it has been assembled, the creative and unprecedented use of contrasting sound sources to create a massive burst of percussion with layers of sample sounding classical and chunks of contemporary polished pop pushed through an analog filter.