Purple Pilgrims – Outside

Purple Pilgrims — the New Zealand-based dream-pop duo composed of sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon — will share their forthcoming third album, Given to the Night, on November 27 via AD 93.

Today, they share the record’s newest single “Outside” — a melodic yet melancholic beauty, reminiscent of the trickling, cyclical environment the sisters placed themselves within to make the record, on an off grid retreat in the NZ countryside. “Last year I felt dead inside, now I’m feeling so alive / Looking from the outside in, again”.

Says the band:

“This song is an ode to outsiders. A term that once felt heavy, now feels like an anointed privilege.

Relishing a space of one’s own. The feeling of putting on headphones and walking through the world – of it and others at the same time — is a sacred space that most of us can relate to, we think.

From that space, ‘Outside’ ponders some fairly existential feelings in passing — from all of our beginnings as pure energy, where and how could we transcend beyond.

How isolating it is to go/grow through something transitional — how it is beautiful too, when broken down into quantum forms.”

In full, Given to the Night translates Purple Pilgrims’ signature kaleidoscopic sound via telepathic sibling connection, focusing on introspective themes of finding light in shadows, and exploring the in-betweens.

The record’s previous single “Innocence Lost” (released September 6) explored the harsh consequences of love amid meticulously layered vocals and swooning guitar.

Truths and secrets often reveal themselves at night, under the freedom of shadowy darkness, away from prying eyes. In creating Given to the Night, sisters Valentine and Clementine Nixon have crafted a world that drifts through the in-between: between dream and reality, between day and night and the undefined, and, ultimately, a world that embraces the discomfort of being untethered. It came to be in a process that followed simplicity and intuition, rather than pre-determined narratives: “We recorded songs as they appeared, which sometimes felt like catching light. Before we realised it we had a record”, the duo explain.

While making the record, Valentine and Clementine gently pushed away from the world — deleted social media, retreated into the trees of their native New Zealand, and only inviting a couple of people in during the recording process. From that space, the album came together in an eerily easeful way.

There is a dream-like drift and sonic timelessness to the the record, as reflected in its nocturnal title, which can be read in two ways: “Being taken by, or being inclined towards nighttime, preferring its blurry cloak of shadows to the harsh light of day; or giving oneself up to night, in sacrifice, letting go of fear and melting into the darkness.”

Written during a time of personal transition there was “a sense of finding the light in the shadow” they add.

Guitar lines float, synth lines entwine, tapes hiss, and vocals stream creating a kaleidoscopic montage of transient memories and emotions. A spectrum of feelings arise — isolation and joy, insomnia and manic highs, confusion and fleeting clarity, grief and healings. In the record, these feelings all merge and fade into one another in a nonlinear manner, as life tends to do; creating something deeply human that simultaneously gestures towards the transcendental.

Sat Dec 5 – TĀMAKIi MAKAURAU / AUCKLAND, NZ – Kāhui St David’s w/ Schofield Strangelove

(Playing a Rare Set) [Strange Universe Fest]

Fri Dec 11 – TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA / WELLINGTON, NZ – Vogelmorn Hall w/ Mercury Fèng

#purplepilgrims