New Music: A Season In Hell

           

These New Puritans have shared new single "A Season In Hell." The track arrives with a video, directed by the band’s longtime friend and collaborator Harley Weir and starring Alexander Skarsgård. Along with the single and video, the band have announced UK and EU tour for October-November 2025, in support of their forthcoming album Crooked Wing, available May 23, via Domino Records. The song features two pipe organs, two sopranos, and two hundred drums, says Jack Barnett. When I was writing it, images of vast, inhuman machinery kept coming into my head – enormous chains, pulleys, grinding gears, molten iron. Huge machines driving into the centre of the earth. And every now and then, a little human amongst it all, barely visible. Then I saw Piranesi's etchings of 'imaginary prisons' from the 1700s, and that's exactly what had been in my head. If we could resurrect him, maybe we could have persuaded him to do the album artwork. Of the song's video, George Barnett says: It was great to bring Alexander Skarsgård and Harley Weir together. They're both old friends of mine, especially Harley who I’ve known since we were teenagers; we share formative tenets and ideas in our work. She makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. "Skarsgård is a rare artist who can move from something experimental to a blockbuster and back. Everything he does is believable. He is high risk, threw himself into it, every detail in him is controlled. He’s magnetic in an otherworldly way, and that worked so well with what Harley does."