Penelope Isles Announce New Album “3” out 25th September via Bella Union
Share First Single + Video “Thinking Seat”
Announce Autumn UK & EU Lives Dates
Penelope Isles announce their long-awaited return with new album 3 due out 25th September via Bella Union and available to preorder here. After a brief disappearance into solo records and restless touring, Wolter siblings Jack and Lily resurface with a record drenched in salt and sun, and the tide pulling at its edges. Three years have gone by since the band’s last live show. Somewhere in between, life happened. Lily spent six months in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, trading songs for surfboards and stepping back from music for the first time in years. Meanwhile, Jack went out on the road as guitarist for CMAT, accompanying her on her unstoppable rise. Both Jack and Lily released acclaimed solo albums over the past year, as Cubzoa and My Precious Bunny respectively. “3” is the sound of this magnetic songwriting duo finding each other again.
To accompany today’s announcement Penelope Isles have shared the album’s irresistible first single “Thinking Seat”, a track about overthinking whilst in the driving seat. Written upon reflection of the thousands of hours spent behind the wheel in the Wolter sibling’s splitter van, the track is a spiralling sequence of worry, heartache, planning, remembering, forgetting, holding it together, staying on track and trying to find a goddamn parking space. The song features the lyric ‘U.G.A.K.I’ (you guys are killing it), a catchphrase the band coined, used when touring felt particularly tough/skint/dirty/ridiculous, in the hope of injecting light humour and positivity into the uphill struggle that is the current state of the music industry. “Thinking Seat” is streaming now on all DSPs and is accompanied by an unexpected self-directed video in which the siblings once again embrace the task of creating a groundbreaking music video on a shoestring budget with a thirty-pound camcorder from CEX.
Remarkable. From the first introduction to the hazy tonality that commences, to the bright atmosphere and the delicate vocal harmonies that shape the emotional intensity of the voyage. This track flourishes throughout its addictive passages and the track showcases the best of this outfit.
Written on a monthlong surf trip to Lagos, Portugal, the songs on 3 have sandy feet and sunburnt shoulders, hooks that glow and harmonies that ache. Beauty built carefully, like a perfect sandcastle on a summer holiday, only to be flattened in an instant by your auntie’s passing cruelty. There’s sweetness here, but it comes with teeth.
A year later, the band flew to the Isle of Lewis off Scotland’s northwest coast to record the album live at Black Bay Studio. Perched on a sheltered harbour, twenty miles from the nearest shop, the refurbished fish factory was the first room the band had ever recorded in outside of their home studio. Engineers Pete and Cal, truly dedicated to the island they live on, held the room for ten days, offering the kind of generous, unhurried attention that lets a record breathe. The remote landscape pulled the Isles into new, thrilling territory. They kept binoculars close by, peering through the soaring live-room window to scan the sprawling coastal view for white eagles and dolphins.
3 is a record of firsts for the Brighton-based band who originally hail from the Isle Of Man. The first as a true three-piece, with close friend Joe Taylor (Anna B Savage, Iona Zajac) joining on drums, and the first they’ve ever recorded live. Jack and Lily trade shimmering guitars and sunlit harmonies like shared secrets, while Joe Taylor anchors it all: falsetto drifting wistfully above, drums crashing below. These are songs that read like postcards or pages ripped from a diary and slipped under someone’s door.
The album carries a lot of the band’s adopted hometown of Brighton. “Bom Bane’s” is named for the off-kilter Kemptown restaurant the band orbited. “Embo” is two verses long and a nostalgia-soaked love letter to a seafront flat at Embassy Court, and the people and memories that passed through it. Most of all 3 is an album made from a lot of love for each other, and the people who have been a part of the band’s lives over the last few years. “Jack and I are blood,” says Lily. “Playing these songs after so much time apart feels like coming home.”
Still obsessed with love, with heartbreak, with what lingers after, Penelope Isles carve out something new here. A shifting coastline of sound: hazy, luminous, and always on the verge of collapse. “Penny Isles is such a big part of our personalities,” says Jack. “So it was about time we got back to it.”
Penelope Isles UK & EU live dates:
Wednesday 21 October – Falmouth – The Cornish Bank
Saturday 24 October – St. Davids – Boia Festival
Sunday 25 October -St. Davids – Boia Festival
Tuesday 27 October – Manchester – YES
Thursday 29 October – Leeds – Hyde Park Book Club
Friday 30 October – London – The Lexington
Saturday 31 October – Brighton – The Hope & Ruin (afternoon show)
Saturday 7 November – The Hague – Crossing Border Festival
Sunday 8 November – Berlin – Neue Zukunft
Monday 9 November – Hamburg – Hebebühne
Wednesday 11 November – Paris – Supersonic
1. Another Kind Of Love
2. I Loved You Robert Pattinson
3. Bom-Bane’s
4. Birthdays
5. Embo
6. Pretty In Pixels
7. Moonwalker
8. You This You Got A Way With Dogs
9. Thinking Seat
10. Am I Going Through This On My Own
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