Turin Brakes

How many pundits frantically casting their runes back in 1999 for predictions for the new millennium would have foreseen that TURIN BRAKES would be releasing their seventh studio album in 2016? While many of the rest of the class of 2000 seem forever frozen into the faces in their yearbook pictures, Turin Brakes are still making their way through the century’s changing landscape and have announced a new album Lost Property and UK tour for early 2016.

Their association with now-fallen giants EMI yielded four internationally-acclaimed albums, with all the trappings of hit singles, billboard ads, and the TV transmissions that are now beaming their way endlessly into space, but the glare of the spotlight left the secret at the heart of their vision still intact and waiting to be discovered. Turin Brakes was created by Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, in a millennial South London bedroom, more out of a shared need to express a hidden message they’d both caught at the century’s end, than in a grab for stardom. Enlisting the membership of long-term collaborators Rob Allum and Eddie Myer, the band carries on because the message is still there, still hidden, still with something to say.

The cover artwork of their new album LOST PROPERTY out in 2016 shows an urban spaceman marooned in a deckchair as, behind the winter lawn, half-hidden shapes loom in the dark. The image is a perfect match for this collection of dispatches from the elusive side of reality that’s just a twist away from the everyday. Their sonic camera pans wider and deeper - trademark West-Coast acoustic guitar and widescreen harmony textures wrap themselves around the enigmatic explorations of normality at the heart of Olly Knight’s lyrics.

Sixteen years of touring across continents have sealed their reputation as a fearsome live act, able to hold any size crowd with the sheer chutzpah of their no-hidden-tricks raw and direct onstage presence. Turin Brakes carry on their secret life, and with a new generation of artists like Max Jury, Aquilo and Benjamin Francis Leftwich starting to beat a path to their door to collaborate, it looks like the secret is getting out.