The thing about covering new music, is that I am so regularly introduced to bands I hadn’t previously heard of. It is both a privilege and a thrill. On that note, I was previously unfamiliar with Modern Woman, but this single, Ford (End of the Road Records) is an instant hit with me, and immediately made its way onto several playlists of mine after first listen.
Bandcamp suggests that the band ‘meld proggy folk-rock and wiry post-punk into an adventurous and elastic sound’; and I can’t say I disagree. In a world where Kate Bush is enjoying a major resurgence – undoubtedly a reaction to featuring in Netflix hit Stranger Things – Modern Woman, (especially singer Sophie Harris) might find themselves flying in the Bush slipstream.
‘Ford has been one of the oldest songs in our repertoire’, says singer and guitarist Sophie Harris.’I wrote the bassline loop for it a long time ago, one day when I only had a bass to hand. I structured the song and added guitar and simple vocal. I wanted to give it a raw and slightly sinister feel to it. We can spend an incredibly long time working a song in our practise space before we ever play it live, so we wanted to make sure that energy resonated through the recording.’
She adds, ‘Lyrically, it is about a girl who borrows her brother’s Ford and drives it around. For Juan’s vocals towards the end of the song, I went with a William Burroughs-esque cut up technique and collected different car-related writings, chopped them up and reformed them.’
Based around the songwriting of Harris, Modern Woman are rounded off by Juan Brint-Gutierrez on bass, David Denyer of percussion, violin and samples and Adam Blackhurst on drums.
The band will be on the road with festival appearances including Latitude and End Of The Road, as well as a tour alongside Sub Pop’s TV Priest in the winter.
Nature poetry. For too long, it’s been the domain of soft-focus sentimentality: predictable scenes of meadows, rivers, and, yes, even gliding gulls.
As 2024 draws to a close, it’s impossible not to marvel at how much has been accomplished in just one year. This
Call for Submissions: Glow: City at Night Poems The Broken Spine is excited to announce that submissions for our latest slimline anthology,
The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
