The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising

It’s not often that you can say with any authority that a new band or artist truly have no comparable contemporaries, but, since emerging onto the scene in 2023, Brighton-based quartet The New Eves have stood as the sole inhabitants of their ever-intriguing niche. Standing - or, more likely, sitting astride a horse - at the crossroads between ancient folk traditions and experimental rock stylings, the band are an emphatically multi-modal proposition, bringing to mind The Wicker Man and the work of Angela Carter as much as they do Patti Smith, The Slits, or The Velvet Underground. And as opening statements go, you can’t get much more evocative than this here debut. Pseudo-title track ‘The New Eve’ is more incantation than song, an arresting, preacher-like manifesto of the multiplicities of modern womanhood: in this framework, The New Eve “spits out the seeds from the fruit of the forbidden tree / And then she plants them, carefully”; she also “eats baked beans”. From rich biblical imagery and warped pastoral scenes (‘Cow Song’) to screeching, string-led tension (‘Highway Man’) and howling invocations (‘Circles’; ‘Mary’), its nine tracks somehow encode a considerable might without ever feeling heavy. Quite the opposite, in fact - if anything, ‘The New Eve Is Rising’ is a playful exercise in boundary-pushing and performance. If the title’s anything to go by, it’s also very much just the beginning.