These New Puritans - Crooked Wing

After a six-year silence, These New Puritans return with Crooked Wing — an audacious reinvention that dismantles genre constraints and merges ethereal beauty with industrial brutality. The album plunges into medieval mysticism and urban desolation, crafting a sonic world where towering cathedrals loom over decaying factories.

Formed in Essex in the late 2000s, the duo initially flirted with post-punk minimalism, but their trajectory quickly expanded beyond conventional classifications. Their fifth studio album, Crooked Wing, is perhaps their most coldly mesmerizing work to date.

The record opens with the chime of a bell in a Greek Orthodox church, setting an eerie tone. A boy soprano, recorded in an isolated Essex chapel, bookends the album — his voice haunting “Waiting and Return”, two pieces that echo the chilling grandeur of Swedish experimentalist Anna von Hausswolff. These tracks evoke the vast solitude of winter landscapes, their gothic and unsettling atmospheres reminiscent of an A24 horror film.

From here, Crooked Wing unfurls its contrasts. “Bells”, one of its centerpiece compositions, hypnotizes with church organs, ancient bells, and pitched percussion. Jack Barnett's detached vocals hover like a specter, transforming the track into something both lullaby-like and unnerving.

Then the album shifts violently. “A Season in Hell” is pure industrial menace — a sonic labyrinth where Barnett's voice ricochets against ominous organ chords, invoking the terror of fleeing through a mechanical wasteland. As the tension peaks, Caroline Polachek’s ethereal harmonies descend like divine intervention, cutting through the storm with celestial clarity.

Polachek is, in many ways, a guiding presence here. Her voice electrifies “Wild Fields”, its guttural power counterbalanced by the album’s softer moments. On “Industrial Love Song”, a duet with Barnett, she delivers an exquisite paradox: despite its name, the song bears no resemblance to the album’s harsher textures. Instead, it’s a delicate, shimmering ballad — like frost crystallizing on a windowpane before vanishing with the morning light.

Recorded near a vast industrial scrapyard, Crooked Wing thrives on contrast. These New Puritans blend the rough edges of their surroundings with elegant, classical instrumentation, striking a balance between chaos and precision.

The album explores a wide range of ideas — hidden worlds, machines, unusual forms of love, nature, and even lost fictional characters. But at its core, Crooked Wing is about human vulnerability, framed by the relentless sounds of grinding metal and heavy chains.

For some, the album’s volatility may be unsettling. At its quietest, Crooked Wing is as light as a breath on a frostbitten morning — icy and ephemeral. But serenity here is fleeting, a mere prelude to the cacophony that lurks in the shadows. There is no peace without the specter of unease.

7.9/10

Crooked Wing’ is coming out on May 23 via Domino Records.