Music News - The Bats announce new album The Deep Set and shares first single 'Antlers'
17 November 2016 - 0 Comments
Uber influential NZ indie-pop legends The Bats have
announced a new album, The
Deep Set (out
January 27 on Flying Nun), and shared the first single Antlers(scroll
down to listen to the worldwide premiere via Noisey). The band also announced
that they will perform The
Deep Set in full as a world premiere for Sydney Festival on January 29, accompanied by
a string section, as well as launching the album in Melbourne the day before at Northcote Social Club on January
28.
Listen to Antlers, the
first single from The Deep Set (out tomorrow on digital release via Flying Nun) here.
Five years after the release of their last critically acclaimed album, The Bats
return with album number nine, The
Deep Set (out January 27 on Flying Nun). With the title
conveying the long established and firmly embedded, it’s notable that it’s
30 years since The Bats began recording their debut album in the living room
studio of a friend of a friend in Glasgow. This time around they recorded
in The Sitting Room,
the studio-sleep out-garage next to Ben Edward’s house in Lyttelton, New
Zealand; following in the footsteps of Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid, Aldous
Harding and many others.
With Ben Edward's help, The
Deep Set continues The Bats’ 21st century resurgence. Yes,
this is The Bats, so the chords still chug, the guitars chime, ring, and
jangle, the melodies are clear and memorable, the rhythm section is
unstoppable. But the band mines the darker, deeper sound that 2011’s Free All the Monsters revealed.
The songs remain reflective but that oft-expected sweet folksiness pops up less
frequently. As the title suggests the music is richer, expansive, deeper.
In their fourth decade as a band familiarity has come to mean a more careful
treatment of each song. Is it maturity? It definitely translates into more
depth and complexity but hey the songs are still as catchy as hell. And as a
lyricist, Robert Scott continues his mastery of the personal and pastoral,
the landscape and longing.
As always the key to The Bats is the emotion that their (seemingly) simple
songs carry. They continue to mine that Mainland melancholy; the kind that
somehow never risks being depressing. But of course that means there is lament
and nostalgia, even if it’s only for last night.
Taking us from the sun of Otago’s Taieri River to darkest Durkestan and
apparently ending in the midst of contemporary New Zealand politics, The Deep Set continues
the composed confidence of their recent albums with one of The Bats’ strongest
sets of songs, fuelled by ever-more powerful guitars. If you grew up with
The Bats their early recordings will always pull at your emotions but while
less vulnerable and immediate than on their classic debut album, The Bats
of the 21st century somehow manage to be more intimate and urgent.
"The Bats were as
much about shifting sadness into pop transcendence as they were about crafting
melancholic tunes… The Bats are a crucial part of the Flying Nun story, as well
as the story of New Zealand music” - POPMATTERS
"Remarkably, the
band's original line-up remains intact. So too does that dreamy, disconsolate
feeling that settles in whenever The Bats' best music takes hold and nimbly
seeps under your skin”- PITCHFORK
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