It was an unlikely collaboration. When Caroline Polachek DM-ed These New Puritans in 2022, the American super popstar and Charli XCX collaborator just “had a feeling they were writing new music”. She was right.
“I told them how much their music meant to me,” Polachek wrote of the Southend-on-Sea hailing duo in an Instagram post this year. “And that I was at their service if new songs ever called for it. A year later we met up in the studio during the solar eclipse and I joined them on three songs.” The result was Industrial Love Song, a haunting love song about two cranes whose shadows never quite meet. Polachek’s trademark near-screams delicately complement the rough vocals from lead singer and songwriter Jack Barnett. Together, their voices twist together over the stripped-back sounds of a foreboding organ.
“She’s got such a beautiful voice that I could make my voice even uglier,” as Jack put it to Crack Magazine this month. It’s rare that a band strives for ugliness but it’s true that These New Puritans (TNP) sometimes swerve from the divine towards the atonal as well as highly unusual in pop music. The effect is both gripping and unnerving.
Now, on a cold November night, those mechanical hymns find their echo inside Village Underground – an odd but staple East London venue made of revamped tube carriages, shipping containers and a warehouse.
Accessed through no more than a near hole in the wall on a side street in the shadows of the new skyscrapers of Shoreditch, Village Underground’s exposed brick walls and high arches echoed the unusual temporal impact of TNPs’ music – both antiquated and aggressively modern which is in itself unsettling.
Since they played their first gigs in a punkier guise 20 years ago, Shoreditch has changed dramatically – having been doused in neoliberal kerosene, it is now spikier and more built up than ever.
Onstage the twins – Jack Barnett on keys and vocals, older brother George Barnett on drums – are accompanied by another percussionist, two wind instrumentalists and a synth player. The setlist weaves between bangers such as the percussive, stirringly dark chant of We Want War, the more jangly and hopeful Fragment Two and the creepy organ chords and screeches that punctuate Spiral. Eerie and irreverent, their music has been consistently evolving, often with atonal winks, and odd, frightening sounds.
The crowd is scarily still, transfixed, and it often feels like we’re at some sort of cursed church service, or a memorial to the now-imploded industrial capitalist age.
This is music that feels like a kind of mental liturgy, requiring the audience to activate neurons buried in long-lost crevices.
Multi-instrumentalist Barnett the younger fits the role of pastor, here to guide you through the service. Throughout the first half of the set hops like a frenzied composer between striking a hunched up Tom Waits-esque figure on the piano and a Christ-like one on the mic.
Here he stands, arms outstretched as if etherised on a cross, being pummelled by the billowing repeated melody of tracks he wrote, that in this performance trundle on indefinitely, well past their natural end. The bass thuds through the floor like distant artillery, while the organ’s high notes seemed to shimmer off the brickwork. The effect is stunning.
It’s hard to make music as affecting and strange as this, with its unique combination of choral sounds, chamber music, chiming bells and brass is very distinctive. They do things like pair a solitary organ with a Southend choirboy’s lilting vocals emulating the words of a space-age labourer – “I am toiling in subterranean fields” waiting for a sound; any sound.
Crooked Wing (May 2025) was written in the shadow of the war in Ukraine but also as a paean to the industrial age. “As we exit the mechanical age, you realise how much we have in common with our machines, how human they are,” Jack Barnett told NME, about Industrial Love Song. “Suddenly it didn’t feel so absurd to write a love song from their perspective.”
If there’s one thing missing from this otherwise transcendental performance, it’s the visuals. Which is a shame because TNP’s music has the sonic effect of sinking into a soundbath, and a touch more deep blue would have made for a more all-encompassing experience. Both brothers are heavily involved in the artwork that accompanies the albums – with Jack Barnett having painted Crooked Wing’s cover art, a gothic oil painting of skeletal trees – which would have made for an arousing backdrop.
The set ends with a dementedly extended edition of Organ Eternal. Jack Barnett signs off early, leaving brother George (who is married to Pixie Geldof) on the drums and Otto Hashmi on the synth to seize control of the final moments of tonight’s mass. It’s somehow very cool to see the frontman ditch early and let the others bathe in the full glory of the audience’s reverence.
Although they have never appeared to chase commercial success, preferring to exist in a liminal space, These New Puritans seem to have a strange effect on people who discover them, especially celebrities. They might be well described as your favourite artist’s favourite artist – Elton John, Björk, Charli XCX and Massive Attack are all fans.
As Polachek puts it: “Jack and George make the kind of stuff that lives in the sacred sector of what I love about music slurred sleepwalking through shifting crystalline mazes of brutal mortal timekeeping”. Seeing them live is like watching a cerebral service to the avant garde.
