The New Eves – Cow Song
Last month, The New Eves—the Brighton-based four-piece of Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mager (bass, vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals)—announced their debut album, The New Eve Is Rising, out August 1st via Transgressive.
The album takes their untamed melting pot of musical styles—an instinctive, incendiary mix of Patti Smith radical poetry, rock’n’roll recklessness, folk-imbued post-punk experimentalism and plenty more—and somehow turns it into a collection of clarion calls that you can still hum. It’s completely immersive; a whole world to dive into that’s taken on a life of its own. Today, they release a third single/video, “Cow Song,” following the previously released singles, “Highway Man,” “The New Eve,” and “Rivers Run Red.”
Born from an improvised jam and recorded partly in a field with a cow named Bonnie, “Cow Song” explores themes of liberation, landscape, and ancestral rituals. The track was inspired by the Swedish pastoral tradition of kulning, a powerful female-led vocal technique used to communicate with each other and call cattle across the mountains, and sees the band lean into their own vocal power with haunting, elemental force. The band comments, “It’s a very beautiful thing and it’s loud! This inspired us to use our voices in a new and bigger way.”
“Cow Song” is about “big mountainous landscapes and the longing to enter them, to simply walk off, to wander,” the band says. “It is also a herding song. The rhythm felt like you were walking with animals, or more precisely, with cows.” Listen closely and you may even be able to very faintly hear Bonnie mooing. The song’s accompanying video was filmed in Sweden this spring and was directed by the band and Hugo Winder-Lind.
Nestled somewhere between primal rock’n’roll live performance and transcendent ritual, there’s an unmistakable alchemy that happens when Violet, Nina, Kate, and Ella step onto a stage together. The band conjures a boundless, uninhibited kind of magic and writes their own rulebook for how to exist—as a band, as women, as humans in the world—from the ground up. They’ve distilled this visceral energy into their extraordinary debut, The New Eve Is Rising.
Written in Brighton and at an artistic residency at The Cornish Bank, and recorded at Rockfield Studios and Bristol’s Cotham Parish Church, The New Eve Is Rising references highwayman’s caves and 12th Century lovers Heloise and Abelard; krautrock and Swedish cow calls and even lyrics whispered into a bat detector. The band call what they make Hagstone Rock. “There’s a lot of mythology around a hagstone, and it’s different in different places, but generally if you look through the hole of hagstone you can see the truth,” says Ella. “We see ourselves as a rock band, but there’s a lot of depth in there and putting hagstone in front of it feels better … It also has the word ‘hag’ in it, which we really identify with.”
“We’re seeing how far we can go as four people by creating our own mythology,” comments Ella. “It’s the idea that you can do what you want—you don’t have to do things a certain way,” Nina says, summing up the revolutionary spirit of The New Eves and their debut. “When we made this band, we didn’t know what to expect. No one gave us permission. You have to do that for yourself.”
The New Eves Tour Dates
Thu. July 24 – Sun. July 27 – Suffolk, UK @ Latitude Festival
Thu. July 31 – Sun. Aug. 3 – Oxfordshire, UK @ Wilderness Festival
Fri. Aug. 1 – London, UK @ Rough Trade East %
Sat. Aug. 2 – Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade %
Tue. Aug. 5 – Liverpool, UK @ Rough Trade %
Wed. Aug. 6 – Nottingham, UK @ Rough Trade %
Fri. Aug. 8 – Brighton, UK @ Resident %
Sat. Aug. 30 – Wiltshire, UK @ End of The Road Festival
Mon. Sept. 15 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare and Hounds 2
Tue. Sept. 16 – Leeds, UK @ Hyde Park Book Club
Thu. Sept. 18 – Glasgow, UK @ Barrowland *
Fri. Sept. 19 – Dundee, UK @ Fat Sams *
Sat. Sept. 20 – Gateshead, UK @ The Glasshouse *
Mon. Sept. 22 – Bristol, UK @ Bristol Beacon *
Tue. Sept. 23 – Cardiff, UK @ The Tramshed *
Wed. Sept. 24 – Cambridge, UK @ Corn Exchange *
Sat. Sept. 27 – Manchester, UK @ The Castle
Fri. Oct. 3 – Bristol, UK @ The Old England
Tue. Oct. 7 – London, UK @ Hoxton Hall
Thu. Oct. 9 – Brighton, UK @ Concorde 2
Fri. Nov. 7 – Paris, FR @ Pitchfork Festival
% = In-store
* = w/ Black Country, New Road
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