THE NEW EVES - The New Eve Is Rising

It opens with a pagan invocation, “The New Eve Is Rising”, the debut LP from New Eves – a Brighton and Hove outfit that has actually been active since 2021. Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar and vocals), Kate Mager (bass and vocals), Ella Russell (flute, drums and vocals) and Violet Farrer (guitar, violin and vocals) call loudly for a new Eve as the guitars build up alongside the strings and the drums thunder like a storm.

Thus begins a psychedelic celebration straight out of Midsommar (judging by the album cover, the girls even seem to be dressed for the occasion). While the trappings and instrumentation used by the four musicians are rooted in folk – as much the good old Fairport Convention kind as the contemporary standard-bearer sound of Lankum – the repetitiveness, the electric jolts and the way of declaiming like urban poetesses recall Patti Smith and Velvet Underground.

All these traits resurface in the manifesto track “Highway Man”, just a moment before “Cow Song” unleashes a bucolic bacchanal led by cutting strings and driven toward a tribal confusion thick with screams, chants and hypnotic rhythms.

The opening section of the record is scorching and gripping, to the point that it's hard to keep your feet still, but Nina, Ella, Kate and Violet stay firmly in control even when the atmosphere turns hazier, in old-fashioned-sounding ballads like “Mid Air Glass”, an “Astrolabe” embellished by the breath of an accordion, and in the moving dirge “Mary”.

The frenzied flute and the trance induced by tubular bells once again stir up the surroundings on the unleashed “Rivers Run Red”, before the record flows into the more pacifying finale (at least in its initial intentions) of “Volcano”.

With all its influences clearly recognisable, New Eves' music certainly doesn't stand out for originality – for long stretches it brings to mind a sort of folk, nature-worshipping variant of “SEXWITCH“. Still, the quartet is deservedly getting people talking, thanks to the quality of their songwriting and their thorough command of their own means. These are qualities that result in fully-realised, irresistible songs, whose spell is truly hard to escape.

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18/08/2025