I Know What You Did Last Summer: Hideous Summer Archive - The New Eve Is Rising Interview With The New Eves

Words by Chiara Strazulla

Photo by Katie Silvester

It feels very much like the moment when everything is happening for The New Eves. The Brighton quartet have been making waves through the British alternative music scene for a few years now, offering something that immediately broke the mould of genres and conventions to prove itself truly unique - an immersive live experience with a viscerally emotional undercurrent to it, a blend of sonorities that draws in equal measure from folk traditions and punk rock, with an ethos that is deeply steeped in performance art and even feminist theory, and so much more. Having released debut album feels as if has been long in the making, and which, even from its title - “The New Eve Is Rising” - is political and defiant, and, most importantly, only the first chapter in a much longer narrative the band has already started weaving.

The album itself is a cavalcade through everything that makes The New Eves’ sets stand out, capturing the moments of solemnity and the turns in which the music becomes almost poetry, but also the distinctive streak of playfulness that is ever present in their live appearances. It is, once again, a narrative - even within the more limited scope of a single song this is still very much a band of storytellers - that opens with a self-titled track, “The New Eve”, that is practically a manifesto, and then continues through a varied mood board of songs, including live favourites like “Cow Song” (think Arcadian reverie meets classic punk bass line) and “Astrolabe” (one of the most interesting tracks, with its use of dissonance and spoken word) to end with another familiar tune, “Volcano”, almost an experiment of painting-through-music. The cover art has a whiff of Joan of Arc to it, with the band proudly holding up a Medieval-style banner. Clearly, this is an album with a mission.

There is probably no other possible starting point, as we discuss the themes in the record with cellist Nina and bassist Kate, than that mission: since the New Eve is rising, who is the New Eve? “If you listen to the lyrics in that song, you will find your answer,” Nina notes - perhaps a little cheekily. “But basically, it is someone who is taking charge of their own fate, of their own story, of their own life, redefining roles and challenging prejudice. A radical, free person. And it’s different for everyone, I guess, precisely because of that. The New Eve is many things”.

Eve is of course a character that comes with a hefty baggage of her own - from the Biblical tale to its many retellings, and everything else that has been done with it besides. How have they confronted this, as a band? “You can try and ignore it, but it’s still there, whether you accept that or not,” Kate points out. “And it’s not just the religious stuff that comes along with Eve, but also the feminist narratives. It’s like examining all of that and working out what, if any, of it actually serves us now. If you engage with it, you can kind of take power over it and make your own version of it”. The title of the album reflects this very well, I point out: like we’ve done all of this with the character, and now we’re doing something new. “Yeah, it’s like everything with The New Eves has been about starting something completely new,” Nina agrees. “It wasn’t intentional, but it happened like that”.

The same observation could easily be applied to their sound, which continues to defy all genre categorisation. “The New Eve will not be put in a box,” Nina smiles, almost a warning, as we consider the industry obsession with genres and sub-genres. “We resist labels. I remember before our first gig, being quite nervous, thinking, will people get this, because this is so weird - with what the music is like, no one knew what to expect. But we got such a strong response. We had literally been in this dark rehearsal studio for months, and now we are showing everyone, this is what we’ve been doing. Anything could have happened, but it all came out of our bodies and our hearts, and it did something to other people”. This breadth of voice also has other advantages: “It helped a lot that we could be put on all sorts of nights with all sorts of lineups,” Kate reminisces. “We would play folk nights and then punk nights, and when we started finding ourselves doing too much of one thing, then we would feel like - we need to stop it from getting too much into one box, because that’s limiting”. “That’s where the music really has to speak for itself,” Nina concludes. “A lot of the time, when people ask us what kind of music we make, we tell them, you have to listen to it, you have to come to a show”. 

There are other boxes to avoid being put in, too: perhaps trickiest of them all, the inevitable categorisation as a ‘female artist’ or ‘female-fronted band’, with its baggage of good intentions and its limiting effects. “It’s a complicated relationship with that,” Kate admits. “Obviously there is this image of us as four women in the hills with the white dresses. But the idea of the New Eve and the music, they’re for everyone. They are about our experiences, and our ideas of being a woman and all that, but they’re also just about being a person, being a human… being an animal. And trying to figure out your identity and your relationship with the world. It’s not just a feminine experience”. That is not to deny the challenges: “The norm has been guys in a band, but that has been changing a lot,” Nina reflects. “There’s so many great people of all genders making music, but there is also still so much prejudice in the music industry. You definitely have to deal with a lot of experiences you wouldn’t have to if it was four guys with two guitars. But it is also part of what we’ve been investigating as a whole, the kind of things we’ve been thinking about”.

The album definitely feels like a milestone in that investigation. “It had been such a build up to it, it was a long time coming,” Nina says. “So we had all these songs literally bursting out of us, and we felt like, this is it, we’re recording, we’re making the album. I think that energy was really driving the whole time”. Is this time to take a breath after the effort, then, or is new music coming already? Kate has no hesitation in opening up about the band’s next chapter: “We’re definitely writing new music, it’s in the works. As soon as we had finished the last day of recording, it felt like we were kind of freed from this stuff now, and we had space to do new things. So we just started creating new stuff straight away”.

The New Eve has risen - and now she is going places.

Photo by Katie Silvester