These New Puritans - Inside The Rose

There’s always been something slightly impenetrable about These New Puritans - the experimental project of brothers Jack and George Barnett. Shapeshifting with every release, aside from actually-quite-fun debut ‘Beat Pyramid’, theirs is music designed to make you work; complex and tangential, never let it be said that TNP are satisfied with an easy listen. Which is obvious fine, and often brilliant, except when the loftyness threatens to outweigh any kind of actual pleasure. And this is where we find ourselves with their first album in six years, ‘Inside The Rose’. It’s dense and claustrophobic, the kind of record that defies you to say you don’t like it, you basic bitch. But by the industrial pulse of the title track (track four of nine, FYI), it already feels like you’ve been trapped in their dense world for an exhausting amount of time. Getting to the end is a slog. Sometimes, maybe you can just be a bit too clever for your own good.