These New Puritans Share New Single 'A Season In Hell' with music video starring Alexander Skarsgård

These New Puritans - Essex brothers Jack and George Barnett - today release their new single ‘A Season In Hell’ and announce a UK and EU tour for October-November 2025, in support of their hugely anticipated new album Crooked Wing, due for release on 23 May, via Domino.

‘A Season In Hell’ arrives with a stunning video, directed by the band’s longtime friend and collaborator Harley Weir and starring the acclaimed actor Alexander Skarsgård.

“The song features two pipe organs, two sopranos, and two hundred drums,” says Jack Barnett of ‘A Season In Hell’. “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.”

“A crooked wing is an ear, you have one on each side of your body, and they have a rippled shape. Maybe if you’re lucky they can help you fly.”

Crooked Wing is the band's long-awaited fifth album - their first in six years. Produced by Jack Barnett and Bark Psychosis pioneer Graham Sutton and executive produced by George Barnett, it ranges from brutal to beautiful, and cements TNP’s reputation for visionary music that defies categorisation and convention. It features an unpredictable lineup of guest musicians such as Caroline Polachek and veteran jazz double-bassist Chris Laurence. ‘A Season In Hell’ follows the previously released singles ‘Bells’ and ‘Industrial Love Song’ (feat. Caroline Polachek).

Pre-order / pre-save Crooked Wing

Watch the video for 'A Season In Hell' here

These New Puritans will mark the release of Crooked Wing with a sold out special performance at EartH in London on 12 June, which will now be followed by a UK and EU tour, announced today and with tickets on general sale at 10am on Friday 2 May. There will be a pre-sale at 10am BST on Thursday 1 May; pre-order Crooked Wing on any format from These New Puritans’ store for first access to the UK tour. See www.thesenewpuritans.com for details.

These New Puritans - 2025 tour dates (new shows in bold)

• 12 June - London - EartH - SOLD OUT
• 29 August - Dorset - End Of The Road Festival
• 4 October - Riga - Skanu Mezs Festival
• 19 October - Luxembourg - Rotondes
• 21 October - Milan - Santeria
• 22 October - Roma - MONK
• 23 October - Bologna - Lokomotiv
• 26 October - Bratislava - Majestic Music Club
• 27 October - Prague - MeetFactory
• 29 October - Paris - Petit Bain
• 30 October - Liege - Reflektor
• 31 October - Brussels - Botanique
• 3 November - Amsterdam – Bitterzoet
• 6 November – Liverpool - District
• 7 November - Manchester - White Hotel
• 10 November - Dublin - Workmans Club
• 12 November - London - Village Underground
• 16 November - Eindhoven - Effenaar
• 19 November - Hamburg - Kampagnel
• 20 November - Berlin - Lido

Reuniting with Graham Sutton - who produced the band’s seminal albums Hidden and Field Of Reeds - on Crooked Wing the band worked extensively on the record’s detailed textures, but with cinematic breadth and scope. On a These New Puritans album, any one song can contain influences from jazz, electronica, classical, industrial music, hip hop, or surrealist inversions of classic crooned balladry, without any one being overwhelmingly obvious.

These are songs about machines, underground worlds, non-human love, light, the sea, death at its most specific and least general, cartoon characters crossing wastelands, and - ultimately - the fragility of small human beings against the whirring of gears and the clanking of chains. Pushing the beautiful up against the brutal, the lullaby with the cacophony, has always been These New Puritans’ way.

Tracklist

1. Waiting

2. Bells

3. A Season In Hell

4. Industrial Love Song

5. I’m Already Here

6. Wild Fields

7. The Old World

8. Crooked Wing

9. Goodnight

10. Return

About These New Puritans

The Barnett brothers were born just two minutes apart in the Essex coastal city of Southend at the close of the 1980s. Their father worked as a builder, their mother an art teacher. At around 7 or 8 years old, the twins began playing music, graduating from plastic toy guitars and karaoke microphones to learning Captain Beefheart songs and recording on cheap four tracks in their early teens. One crucial and revealing hobby was slowing down the sonic pyrotechnics of Aphex Twin tracks, all the better to understand their vertiginous peaks and sudden, gurning drops frozen in slow motion.

Debut album Beat Pyramid (2008) afforded the band a breakthrough. Its brittle post-punk (albeit with a dose of Timbaland-era pop) stood out amongst the relatively conservative musical landscape of the time, but what happened next was far more interesting.

Most careers struggle to contain even one seismic direction shift: These New Puritans pulled off two in quick succession. Stark and confrontational, Hidden (2010) used Japanese Taiko drums, a children’s choir and the sound of sharpening knives to conjure their first masterpiece. It was NME’s album of 2010, at the same time praised by The Wire magazine and broadsheets for its sustained fusion of Benjamin Britten, J Dilla and Diwali Riddim.

But just as Hidden was winning acclaim, something quickly changed. Field Of Reeds (2013) was yet another startling left turn, a grand and cinematic reverie built on complex woodwind, brass, strings, choir and deep bass vocal arrangements - and a recording of a harris hawk. It was once again widely acclaimed, and led to a 2014 tour with a 35 piece orchestra which took in Paris’ Pompidou Centre and London’s Barbican (later released as Expanded: Live at the Barbican).

Following Field Of Reeds was Inside The Rose (2019), a deliberately direct and even romantic album that pared back its predecessor’s orchestral scale to something more propulsive and shimmering. The band were hand-picked by David Lynch for an appearance at the Manchester International Festival’s David Lynch Presentsevent. Then, just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic, These New Puritans debuted The Blue Door at The Barbican, an audio-visual performance with scaffold and silk sculptures by George, centred on Inside The Rose with an expanded percussion ensemble. Plans for an international tour of the show were put on ice.

The cult duo return with one of 2025’s boldest and most immersive records, shifting between the brutal and the beautiful. Crooked Wing cements These New Puritans’ status as visionaries - defying genre, rejecting convention, and delivering their most moving, powerful work yet.