The New Eves : The New Eve Is Rising
Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch once mused about making a new cult every day, but The New Eves actually set the parameters, wrote up the bylaws and lit the bonfire. “The New Eve,” the first track on the Brighton and Hove band’s debut The New Eve Is Rising, is as much manifesto as ceremonial ritual as social critique, celebrating a messianic matriarch that’s “curious and free, she eats what she wants to/Every fruit from every tree.” There’s something at once charming and ominous about the vocalist/cellist Nina Winder-Lind’s portrait of this totemistic figurehead over an eerie arrangement that swells to life with power and menace: “The new eve is rising, from the pages of a burnt bible/from the roadsides and the gutters, the marshes and the meadows.” The portrait they paint is hyper-specific—she eats baked beans and cries into her pillow and plays the guitar and has a baby—but always expanding, the whole of The New Eve ultimately less an ideal to live up to but a complex but grounded tangle of traits that revokes her halo and imbues her instead with an approachable, admirably imperfect humanity.
There’s always a lot happening in a song by The New Eves, a band whose elaborate stage setup creates challenges for any sound engineer. Yet entwined with the band’s elaborate concepts and pageantry is a kind of abrasive immediacy. Their pagan punk-folk (but not folk-punk) aesthetic echoes the iconoclastic art-rock of the Velvet Underground as much as Dutch anarchopunk band The Ex’s recordings with Tom Cora or the carnivalesque psych of ‘60s era group The United States of America. But in moments like the eerily hypnotic “Highway Man,” easy parallels prove inadequate, its descending post-punk bassline underscoring Winder-Lind’s delivery of outlaw justice with hair-trigger intensity: “They try to kill her, she pulls the trigger/Shoots them down one by one!”
The New Eves take on a glam rock strut on “Cow Song” and bring a sprightly groove to life with bright flashes of flute on “Rivers Run Red.” The New Eves evoke “Venus in Furs” on “Astrolabe,” driven by an austere wheeze of a harmonium and a steady stab of cello, and its invocation of a “child of carnal desire.” The New Eves create a mesmerizing and overlapping series of layers as they chant “Circles within circles within circles” on “Circles,” its vocal arrangement seemingly mimicking the message contained therein. The New Eves even harness the awesome, violent power of nature on “Volcano,” its slow burning progression and stunning vocal harmonies gradually growing into the eruption it suggests is imminent (“I can smell sulfur, I can smell soot”).
The New Eves’ debut just happened to arrive as I started up quarterly roundups of both punk and folk music on this website, their debut full-length sending my eyes darting between both documents to try and determine which best suits their ceremonial pagan dirges. The answer is both, neither, somewhere in the middle of the venn diagram and orbiting both perimeters. There’s something wonderfully, satisfyingly challenging about a band that tells you exactly what it is in the first song of its debut album and still leaves you working out that puzzle well after it’s over.
Label: Transgressive
Year: 2025
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The New Eves : The New Eve Is Rising
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