Inside the Rose

What These New Puritans offer with Inside The Rose is something rich, deep and warm, constantly shifting, challenging. This is art for the head, for the heart, for the soul.

The powerful fusion of the electronic and the classical crucially allows the brothers to lightly grasp the hands of their listener, and guide them through dreamscapes of cosmic beauty, searing light and haunting darkness.

This is a taut, tight and testing collection of songs, which seems an entirely natural progression. These New Puritans are the only band on the planet that could create an album like this, build a discography like this.

On Inside of Rose, the duo chisel their rimy, amorphous arrangements into a finely pointed portrait of emotional disintegration.

It’s an irony that musicians who regard pop with suspicion usually turn out to be quite good at making it.

TNP have slimmed down, morphing into a thoughtful electronic pop group with shades of Depeche Mode or late Talk Talk. [May 2019, p.37]

Over a decade into their career, These New Puritans continue to defy expectation or catagory, making a significant event out of each release.

There are moments when you think it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that it might reach a wider audience than These New Puritans have previously captured, but that seems beside the point: it feels less like a lunge for the charts than another stopping point on an increasingly fascinating musical journey.

While it's undoubtedly the frontman's vision at play here, it's the alchemy between the siblings that turns these songs into something truly special. [May 2019, p.106]

While you couldn’t say Inside The Rose goes beyond the furthest reaches of moments such as V (Island Song), from its predecessor, neither does it play things safe. Newcomers may feel that elements of Kate Bush circa Hounds Of Love or Hansa Studios-era Depeche Mode provide reference points, yet nevertheless, a track such as Beyond Black Suns is nothing but pure TNP: overlapping motifs, doom-laden beats, interweaving vocal lines and a song that resolves nothing, but does so with the utmost confidence.

Putting aside musical intricacies, Inside the Rose just sounds amazing, conjuring a lustrous, lucid world shaken by distant explosions. The drones of strings, pianos, and electronics are offset by bright accents of tuned percussion, sustaining an atmosphere of anticipation and wonder.

Some listeners will have been craving something more alienating to sink their teeth into, but what we actually have is an appetising, confident statement of intent from a band that want us to know that they are still a force in contemporary music.

Rarely does it feel extraneous. Instead, it’s quite homogeneous, with certain timbres popping up again and again, underpinned by George Barnett’s commanding drumwork. This single-mindedness coincides with the group becoming a duo again.

He and his brother have made an album that’s too impersonal to provide an actual emotional connection but also lacking the vision necessary to provide something out of this world.

Getting to the end is a slog. Sometimes, maybe you can just be a bit too clever for your own good.

A slow slog through a murky alternate dimension, from a band who made their name on vibrancy and experimentation, Inside The Rose is frustratingly lacking in both.