'Inside The Rose' is the first new album from These New Puritans in six years. Mixed in Los Angeles, it is an ambitious forty minute return.  It arrives, following sessions in Berlin, London, and Southend-on-Sea.  

To work on the follow-up to their 'Field Of Reeds' album, Jack Barnett of TNP moved to Berlin, not in a 'trust fund edgelord in a black coat outside the Berghain night club' sort of way, but purely because he could afford to get studio space in a large old Communist-era radio studio.

"I'm not really in Berlin because I love the mystique of [the city] or anything like that, so the whole miserable winter thing doesn't really hold anything for me," he told me a few years ago. "It could be anywhere, I'm the sort of person where my environment doesn't have a massive effect on what I do, I don't think it would change the music particularly."

There, he forged forward as part of a two-member core operation with twin brother George (other 'New Puritan Thomas Hein has departed to take a PhD in neuroscience). Additional contributions came from long-time collaborators Graham Sutton and conductor Andre De Ridder, yet even with this palette, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, 'Field Of Reeds II'. How could it be?

That's not to say this is a comedown. It's a consolidation, yes, but rather than tread water These New Puritans continue to explore and augment their own landscape.

1.Infinity Vibraphones
2. Anti–Gravity
3. Beyond Black Suns
4. Inside The Rose
5. Where The Trees Are On Fire
6. Into The Fire
7. Lost Angel
8. A–R–P
9. Six