05 December 2025

THE NEW EVES – The New Eve Is Rising (2025, LP/CD Transgressive Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Transgressive Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Black Vinyl

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Baby Pink Vinyl

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Pomegranate Splatter and White Vinyl with bonus 7″ single (Rough Trade exclusive limited to 1200 copies)

Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition

Release Date: 1 Aug 2025

In the shifting constellation of today’s underground, where bands flicker and fade like half-remembered dreams, The New Eves stand out like a signal flare cutting through the fog. Hailing from Brighton, England — the four-piece formed in 2021 — the group consists of Violet Farrer (guitar/violin/vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello/guitar/vocals), Kate Mager (bass/vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums/flute/vocals). Though rooted in a shadowy blend of pagan folk, post-punk gravity and spectral psychedelia, their lineage carries a clear spiritual ancestor: Patti Smith.
Not in imitation, but in inheritance — a shared sense of poetic ferocity, incantatory lyricism, and that unmistakable stance of total artistic conviction. You feel it in the way the band approaches vocals like spells, in the raw-boned honesty of their writing, and in the fearless way they treat performance as a lived, breathing ritual. Patti Smith’s echo appears not as nostalgia, but as a torch they carry forward, reimagined through their own mythic, feminine lens.

There’s something uncanny about them — not the theatrical uncanny of stage gimmicks, but the organic, lived-in strangeness of musicians who treat atmosphere like a ritual medium. Violins scrape open new colors; cellos drone; flutes breathe ancient airs over punk-inflected percussion; guitars shimmer, bite, or collapse into drones. Voices overlap like shifting personalities in the same myth. If most bands build songs, The New Eves conjure worlds — shadowy, luminous, half-feral worlds where folklore, female power and modern anxiety tangle together.

Their debut album, “The New Eve Is Rising” (2025, Transgressive Records), doesn’t simply mark the arrival of a new act. It feels like a summoning — the first chapter of a band tapping into something older and deeper than genre language usually allows. The record carries the weight of stories old and new: mythic echoes, pagan rites, buried symbols, and modern defiance infused with a Patti-Smith-like urgency.

You don’t listen to it so much as step into it — once inside, the exit shifts behind you.

Before we descend into the album track by track, a warning:
This is not a record meant to sit politely in the background.
It creeps in.
It blooms.
It stares back.

And with that — let’s open the door…

Side ‘A’ contains 5 tracks, while Side ‘B’, 4. The opener “The New Eve” (3:17) is nothing but a raw, slow-burning manifesto. The sociopolitical edge cuts immediately, like a sermon for a future matriarchy: “…The New Eve is curious and free… She eats what she wants to eat, every fruit from every tree… The New Eve is not ashamed when she bleeds… The New Eve spits out the seeds from the fruit of the forbidden tree…” The escalation is subtle, almost deceptive, a climb toward a climax that never quite arrives, leaving the listener suspended in anticipation. By the end the atmosphere is outright punk, a sonic invocation of the High Priestess herself, Patti Smith, with an echoed Velvet Underground haze forming around the edges — the album’s first spectral signpost! The next one, “Highway Man” (3:42) is a punch to the chest. Killer bass lines drive the whole thing forward with ruthless intent; the three-chord guitar is pure punk minimalism; the vocals shake with urgency; and the cello is on absolute fire, injecting a violently brilliant VU aura. Imagine Patti’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger” played at CBGB by the Velvet Underground — that’s the exact chaotic glory captured here. A punk-a-delic explosion! “Cow Song” (6:21) begins like a skewed acoustic country tune from another dimension — then mutates. Faster, wilder, hotter: the cello lights up again and the track morphs into a full PSYCH cow-punk anthem. Suddenly it drops back down, breathes, then surges again into a mesmerizing punk-a-delic swirl before finally circling back to its humble acoustic origins. A complete trip, disorienting in all the right ways. “Mid Air Glass” (2:54) shows the most Velvet Underground-esque moment so far. Raw, murky, a little creepy, drifting in an abstract, dream-punctured fog with a mystical, punk-psych attitude embedded in its bones, like an unspoken spell. Side ‘A’ closes with a strange, spectral beauty called “Astrolabe” (3:25). Funereal folk under the influence of acid dawns over the track, with Patti Smith’s spirit hovering boldly above the recited—not sung—lyrics. The cello shines with an almost mournful radiance. A ritual disguised as a song… Side ‘B’ opens with another wonderfully “off” construction, “Circles” (4:31). Spoken-word verses unfold like a poem read in the dark; lo-fi acoustics keep everything intimate. Then — without warning — boom: you’re suddenly teleported onto the stage of CBGB. Punk-a-delic chaos erupts, with cello and violin dueling in their own ecstatic battle while the guitar watches from above. A full-blown strings orgy. The most anarchic chamber-punk moment on the album… “Mary” (3:45) starts and there’s a clear change of scenery. Harmonica-breath and gentle nostalgia set the tone, the guitar painting a soft, ethereal sadness. A hymn for the Lady of Sorrow, Mother Mary. But then the mood fractures and transforms into a rallying cry: a sharp social outburst, a punk-charged anthem of grief and resistance. The flute brings a trippy, folkloric current to the fore on “Rivers Run Red” (3:19), while the bowed strings — cello, violin, or both in wild entanglement — stir up that familiar Velvet Underground electricity. Hazy, raw, punked-out, and dripping with adrenaline. Sweat-soaked transcendence… The album comes to an end with “Volcano” (8:31), a slow acoustic awakening, guided by a serene flute that feels like a doorway into the past. The track gradually opens up, each instrument contributing to a warm, folk-psych tapestry, vocals rising like a choral invocation. But inevitably, the lava erupts: the band plunges back into their signature territory where Velvet Underground meets early Patti Smith, erupting in sprawling punk-a-delic fever. An epic closer — half ritual, half detonation.

In conclusion, “The New Eve Is Rising” is a rare debut — a record that does not merely introduce a band, but constructs an entire cosmology around them. The New Eves draw from punk, psych, folk, poetry, ritual, and political fire to assemble a sound that feels simultaneously ancient and immediate. This is music that doesn’t ask for your attention — it summons it. And if this album is a rising, then whatever comes next will be a transformation… One of the Best albums of 2025. Dig… TimeLord Michalis