Penelope Isles – 3
Today, Penelope Isles announce their long-awaited return with new album 3 due out September 25 via Bella Union.
After a brief disappearance into solo records and restless touring, Wolter siblings Jack and Lily resurface with a record drenched in salt and sun, and the tide pulling at its edges. Three years have gone by since the band’s last live show. Somewhere in between, life happened. Lily spent six months in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, trading songs for surfboards and stepping back from music for the first time in years. Meanwhile, Jack went out on the road as guitarist for CMAT, accompanying her on her unstoppable rise. Both Jack and Lily released acclaimed solo albums over the past year, as Cubzoa and My Precious Bunny respectively. 3 is the sound of this magnetic songwriting duo finding each other again.
To accompany today’s announcement Penelope Isles have shared the album’s irresistible first single “Thinking Seat”, a track about overthinking whilst in the driving seat.
Written upon reflection of the thousands of hours spent behind the wheel in the Wolter sibling’s splitter van, the track is a spiralling sequence of worry, heartache, planning, remembering, forgetting, holding it together, staying on track and trying to find a goddamn parking space. The song features the lyric ‘U.G.A.K.I’ (you guys are killing it), a catchphrase the band coined, used when touring felt particularly tough/skint/dirty/ridiculous, in the hope of injecting light humour and positivity into the uphill struggle that is the current state of the music industry. “Thinking Seat” is streaming now on all DSPs and is accompanied by an unexpected self-directed video in which the siblings once again embrace the task of creating a groundbreaking music video on a shoestring budget with a thirty-pound camcorder from CEX.
3 is a record of firsts for the Brighton-based band who originally hail from the Isle Of Man. The first as a true three-piece, with close friend Joe Taylor (Anna B Savage, Iona Zajac) joining on drums, and the first they’ve ever recorded live. Jack and Lily trade shimmering guitars and sunlit harmonies like shared secrets, while Joe Taylor anchors it all: falsetto drifting wistfully above, drums crashing below. These are songs that read like postcards or pages ripped from a diary and slipped under someone’s door.
Written on a monthlong surf trip to Lagos, Portugal, the songs on 3 have sandy feet and sunburnt shoulders, hooks that glow and harmonies that ache. A year later, the band flew to the Isle of Lewis off Scotland’s northwest coast to record the album live at Black Bay Studio. Beauty built carefully, like a perfect sandcastle on a summer holiday, only to be flattened in an instant by your auntie’s passing cruelty. There’s sweetness here, but it comes with teeth.
Still obsessed with love, with heartbreak, with what lingers after, Penelope Isles carve out something new here. A shifting coastline of sound: hazy, luminous, and always on the verge of collapse. “Penny Isles is such a big part of our personalities,” says Jack. “So it was about time we got back to it.”
Additionally, Penelope Isles have announced UK & EU headline shows and festival appearances in October and November.
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