“Utter conviction and utter naivety”: the recording story behind ‘Hidden’ by These New Puritans
When These New Puritans emerged with their debut album Beat Pyramid in 2008, their sound was something of a mishmash of all the musical trends that had been and gone throughout the large majority of the decade that preceded it. There were shades of the angular post-punk revival that Bloc Party had dabbled in, and there were scatterings of the dance and rave-oriented slants on indie music that the likes of The Rapture and Klaxons were also peddling before them. While the Southend group were far too good to be chucked into the indie landfill slag heap, there also wasn’t anything that dramatically separated them from the rest of the crowd enough for them to make an impression.
Frontman Jack Barnett doesn’t particularly like the album and instead considers the group’s follow-up, 2010’s Hidden, to be “the first legitimate TNP release”. This quote is lifted from a letter penned by Barnett that was included in the 10th-anniversary vinyl reissue of their second album, which goes into detail on how the record came into existence and how the band pushed themselves to the absolute extreme to create the album that would see them transcend far beyond their initial indie categorisation.
If Talk Talk’s reinvention in the late 1980s from being a synthpop group to becoming the post-rock pioneers that would release Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock is considered the benchmark for a band leaping into territories that nobody had considered them to be capable of, then These New Puritans’ jump from Beat Pyramid to Hidden can be seen as a parallel. Having spawned from a period of time where guitars reigned supreme, for the band to ditch them entirely on their second album in favour of genuine avant-garde experimentation, foley recordings and morbid-sounding woodwind and brass arrangements were not just a surprise, but it would have appeared to be a death wish upon the band.
From the opening instrumental track, ‘Time Xone’, it’s immediately apparent that this is not the same version of the band that appeared on Beat Pyramid. The neo-classical approach that Barnett took to composition for the album, having taught himself music notation in just three months in order to arrange the parts that a 13-piece Czech chamber orchestra would play, is immediately presented before the sharp descent into ‘We Want War’ sees the gentle wind and brass get clattered by throbbing electronic bass and the pounding of Japanese taiko drums. We also hear Barnett attempt to sing in a way that wasn’t present on their debut album, ditching the Estuary sprechgesang for something more in keeping with the dour tone of the record.
The remainder of the album sees this heady mix of classical instrumentation being pitted against industrial sounds, with certain effects being present on the album to create the “heavy and brutal” music that the band had envisaged making. Broken glass, swords being pulled from sheaths and “dragging every chain in B&Q through the aisles to test their relative sounds” can all be heard across the 11 tracks of Hidden, but it isn’t all as hyper-macho and violent as all of this might give the impression. The record also sees the band interpolate the Edward Elgar composition ‘Where Corals Lie’ and make use of the pure voices of a children’s choir to elevate the mood from being too dreary throughout.
There’s a wealth of different sounds present on the record, and all of them appear as barmy as the next, with a watermelon with cream crackers attached to it being struck by a sledgehammer being the apex of the sonic madness. From stories of not being able to haul the taiko drums off the trucks and into the studio to Jack Barnett’s purchase of a conductor’s baton to wind up his twin brother and the band’s drummer, George, the entire process of creating the album reads like a car crash waiting to happen.
The end result, however, is one of boundary-pushing brilliance and shows just how much their dedication to creating this nightmarish, harebrained vision could take them. While there are flaws in the record, and while the band would eclipse what they achieved on this record with the even more refined Field of Reeds in 2013, it’s still a remarkable record that celebrates inventiveness and a desire to shake off all accusations of staying too close to one’s own lane.
“We combined utter conviction and utter naivety,” Barnett concluded, insisting that everything that made it onto the album was a deliberate decision that was born out of passion. “We drew on many things not out of a sense of irony or pastiche, but a conviction that beauty and depth could be found in other places.”
