The New Eves at Hyde Park Bookclub
Johnny James, Managing EditorBook now
The New Eves
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
The New Eves are one of those bands that leave you slightly unsure what just happened. Their shows feel less like performances and more like strange little ceremonies: equal parts gig, art piece, and pagan rite.
On stage, they move between instruments – guitar, cello, flute, drums – dressed in white, barefoot, and occasionally covered in stage blood. At times they sound like a half-remembered folk song; at others, like they’re trying to summon something darker, channelling the raw intensity of early PJ Harvey or the ritualistic edge of Dead Can Dance, with chanting and experimental dance heightening the theatricality.
The band came together through Brighton’s post-pandemic underground, though only one member is actually from the city. The others arrived from elsewhere – one from Sweden – drawn by the kind of chaotic creativity Brighton still attracts. Their bond formed around a shared urge to make something unfiltered and communal. Something that’s now taken on a life of its own: “We’re all adhering to The New Eve entity of the band,” says Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals). “The band knows what it wants.”
They call what they do Hagstone Rock – a nod to folklore, to truth-seeing, to the idea that something hidden might be revealed if you’re paying attention. Their debut album The New Eve Is Rising was written partly during a residency at The Cornish Bank, and recorded between Rockfield Studios and a church in Bristol. It runs on instinct and friction: string drones, spoken word, clashing harmonies, and bursts of raw melody. You’ll catch echoes of Patti Smith’s radical poetry, the John Cale-era Velvet Underground, and various freak folk experimentalists – but it never really settles. It’s not supposed to.
Despite the spectacle, nothing about The New Eves feels contrived. The drama comes from total commitment – from watching a group of people trying to work something out in real time. Their looseness on stage keeps things taut and unpredictable, the atmosphere shifting between trance-like stillness and sudden bursts of visceral energy.
At Hyde Park Book Club – one of the North’s most reliably adventurous small venues – that energy should hit just right: intimate, a little uneasy, and hard to look away from.
