These New Puritans: Hidden Treasures

“I just find bands that think they’re experimental… when they play, everyone knows what to expect. They’ll do something like produce a piece of music that’s really noisy. I hate music that is just noise, distortion...”

Words: Bronya Louise Francis
Photos: Ren Rox

Artrocker met up with Jack from These New Puritans to discuss some stuff, mostly their new album, ‘Hidden’, that is so utterly divine. Have you seen the video for ‘We Want War’? If you haven’t, you’re missing out - such a piece of art, I tell ya. Anyway, we’ll talk more about that later…
For the mean time, over cups of elaborately decorated hot chocolate (don’t ask- it was just dead fancy, that’s all you need to know), we start to discuss how TNP’s progressed to the, clearly, beat-driven sound of their new album, ‘Hidden’. Jack begins: “Everything has been taken a step further. Harmonically, it’s really complex; like ‘We Want War’ is really rich; it’s got a lot of unusual chord progressions. I suppose we’ve used different methods… our first album was made with a lot of sampling and things like that; this one is a lot more to do with natural instruments.”
That’s certainly true - in the new album you’ll come across an array of orchestral instrumentation, including solo piano flurries here and there, wind sections, brass sections, the lot. Name an instrument and The Puritans have used it. Even a flugelhorn’s thrown in somewhere. “Everything that you hear that sounds like a real instrument is a real instrument… it’s completely different to our first album. We brought in loads of different people from the Royal Academy of Music, session musicians… we flew into Prague one day and recorded a brass band… every day we’d bring in different session musicians, like clarinettists, a contrabassoonist, a tuba player… it was all written completely beforehand,” Jack recounts.
Writing for so many instruments was not exactly familiar to Jack, as he explains: “I had to learn how to - well, I already knew a bit - but I had to learn how to properly do it. I had to arrange for thirteen different instruments, some of which I’d never heard… it was intense. I spent a month learning how to do it every single day, and then about two months writing it. It was a combination of that and sequencing on the computer.”
Jack writes pretty much all of the music and co-produced the album with Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis and Boymerang: “He was a drum and bass producer. He comes from all these different worlds. He has a vast knowledge of musical language, so yeah it was pretty good to work with him.”
For those of you who have heard the more melody-orientated ‘Beat Pyramid’, which includes the catchy ‘Numbers’ and ‘Elvis’ (for which there is also a brilliant video that you should check out), you may be surprised by These New Puritans’ new beat-driven creation. Jack predicts how the listeners will react, arguing: “In a way I think it’s more accessible than the first album. Our first album was [based on] one mindset the whole way through; this is, in a funny way, a lot more emotional, and has a more interesting sound, more interesting subject matter.” We start to discuss how sometimes bands can get caught up in writing the same sort of material for multiple albums. “I hate that when bands do all that, and just put more production [to their music], and that’s them kind of like maturing. I always knew this album would be completely different to the first one.”



Jack’s brother, George, who is away on a modelling trip (but shh, you don’t know that… it’s kind of a secret part-time job), is responsible for the visual elements of the band, and created the video for ‘We Want War’, with the help of director Daniel Askel. “A lot of bands ignore it,” Jack begins, on the subject of aesthetics, “I’m not really that much of a visual person; well, I do drawing, that type of thing… I only really do the music, but I think the fact that George does the other side of it means that we cover everything together. I always think it looks a bit crap when videos aren’t anything to do with the music… or when [a band’s video features] a bloke that they haven’t even met or spoken to.”
If you haven’t seen These New Puritans’ videos, they are quite avant-garde so to speak, experimental even, much like their music. But Jack is quick to refute this claim about the band, as sound clips like drawing swords and breaking glass, he argues, are “quite old-fashioned”. Why is he so reluctant to accept the ‘experimental’ label that so many people are giving TNP? “I just find bands that think they’re experimental… when they play, everyone knows what to expect. They’ll do something like produce a piece of music that’s really noisy. I hate music that is just noise, distortion, and things like that. That music’s just not for me.” When asked if he liked the lo-fi movement that arose last year, Jack simply answers dryly: “No. No I don’t. It just makes music sound crap.”
Nonetheless, talking about his goals when making music, Jack immediately becomes excitable, clearly ever so passionate about the process: “To me, the whole aim is to make it as pure and as hi-fi as possible. I’ve always liked film soundtracks; they always have those sounds that are so amazing. That’s one of the reasons why things like the sword sounds are on [the new album]. Why aren’t there those really dramatic sounds in movies [used in] albums and songs?”
You may or may not know that what nudged TNP from indiedom, if there is such a thing, into the limelight, was their collaboration with Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme in 2007 before they’d even made their first record. But we don’t want to know about fashion, so instead Jack details with whom he’d like to collaborate in the music industry: “I’ve been writing this music that’s just piano music and voice. There’s a singer called Richard Sincair, who was in a ‘70s rock band. He’s a really good singer and he played on Robert Wyatt’s music a lot; he’s got kind of a similar voice [to Robert Wyatt] but I prefer Richard Sinclair’s voice in a way. Also, there’s a composer called Richard Gordon Bennett - he’s not very well known, an English composer, but he also writes ITV drama music, and he writes really good, weird, odd music that was quite an influence on our new album. It would be good to work with him at some point.”
It wouldn’t be surprising if these collaborations came about for the next album, but who knows what this band will do next? And don’t fear; if after listening to ‘Hidden’ you wonder, “how could These New Puritans top this orchestral madness?!”, it doesn’t look like they’ll disappoint when it comes to future records. Jack concludes: “I’m thinking steel drums - but not in a happy, Caribbean way - in a melancholy way. I’ve got some ideas.”
On that note, it’s safe to say that there’s a lot more to come from what is one of the most exciting, original new bands around.