Monday 18 July 2016


BRAND NEW ALBUM ‘THE DEVIL, THE HEART & THE FIGHT’
OUT 30TH SEPTEMBER 2016 
CHECK OUT LEAD SINGLE ‘WANTED’

The unstoppable, wide-eyed, rump-shaking force of Skinny Lister continues apace with the announcement of their third studio album ‘The Devil, The Heart & The Fight’ to be released on 30th September 2016 through Xtra Mile Recordings. 



With lead single ‘Wanted’ – a fiery Elvis-gone-folk roar of an opener that sees frontman Dan Heptinstall saluting London, New York and Cairo in a song “about looking for life in the cities we’d visit” – ‘The Devil, The Heart & The Fight’ comes out fists first. 

Check out the lyric video for ‘Wanted’


If their folk debut album (Forge & Flagon, 2012) celebrated the sticks and their punkier second (Down On Deptford Broadway, 2015) blinked in the bright lights of London; their rocked-up third, ‘The Devil, The Heart & The Fight’, sees them go global. Pieced together while on the road, and recorded over five weeks in Newcastle Under Lyme’s Silk Mill Studio in May 2016 with producer Tristan Ivemy (Frank Turner, The Holloways), it is Skinny Lister’s most far-reaching, exciting and accomplished album yet. It’s a full-on rock record that splashes even more punk vigour and eighties pop elements across their fervent folk canvas, taking in hints of Adam Ant and The Clash. It also brings the folk storytelling tradition bang up to date with its brutally honest and close to the knuckle lyrics of real-life stories (‘Geordie Lad’, ‘Charlie’) and on-the-road mayhem, the Pogue-ish ‘Hamburg Drunk’.



A mature, vibrant and varied record, it mingles classic Skinny folk romances (‘Grace’, ‘Reunion’) with epic rock takes on rafter-rattling shanties (‘Beat It From The Chest’) and hearty Dexys-style tributes to the fans they meet on the road (‘Fair Winds & Following Seas’), plus a hitherto unseen darker side. Take the deceptively upbeat ‘Injuries’, Dan’s ode on the bruising nature of life, or ‘Devil In Me’, in which Lorna comes on like a particularly melodic Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: “the devil in me will come for you and you’ll pay the price for not being very nice… you took my life, I’m taking yours, that seems to me a fair trade”. Gulp.



‘The Devil, The Heart & The Fight’ is like Skinny’s previous albums gone backpacking; expanding its horizons, full of adventure, discovering itself and doing things it regrets in the morning. Have heart, ye devils, join the fight.



With the exception of the 5 weeks recording the album, Skinny Lister have spent the last 18 months on the road touring across the UK, Europe and North America to ever-increasing crowds. Their infectious, feel-good and uplifting performances are winning over fans all across the globe, whether its supporting label mate Frank Turner on his arena tours or headlining their own sold out shows across America. They’re a twelve-legged party machine and one of the best live bands in the country. See for yourself on their biggest headline tour to date throughout October.
 

Before that though, Skinny will be performing a special album announcement party in their adopted home town of Hastings at The Albion on 28th July 2016. Click here for tickets.

UK HEADLINE TOUR
OCTOBER
4 Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
5 Manchester, The Ruby Lounge
6 Newcastle, The Cluny
7 Glasgow, Nice N Sleazy
13 Norwich, Waterfront Studio
14 Nottingham, The Bodega SOLD OUT
15 Leicester O2 Academy 2
18 Bristol, Exchange
19 Southampton, The Joiners SOLD OUT
20 London, The Garage

TRACKLISTING FOR ‘THE DEVIL, THE HEART & THE FIGHT’
1. Wanted
2. Geordie Lad
3. Tragedy In A Minor
4. Devil In Me
5. Injuries
6. Reunion
7. Beat It From The Chest
8. Hamburg Drunk
9. Grace
10. Charlie
11. Fair Winds & Following Seas
12. Carry

PRE-ORDERS:
Anyone who pre-orders the album by July 28th will be richly rewarded with a massively exclusive prize wherever you are in the world - a prize so amazing we can't even speak about it yet! Just keep hold of your proof of purchase! More info to follow....

Xtra Mile: http://smarturl.it/DevilHeartFight_XMR
Banquet Records: http://smarturl.it/DevilHeartFight_Bnqt
Amazon: http://smarturl.it/DevilHeartFight_Amz
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/DevilHeartFight_iT

Saturday 16 July 2016

 SAINT LEONARD’S HORSES
Debut album ‘Good Luck Everybody’
Out on 14 October 2016
Stream ‘Spooky Lover’


Xtra Mile Recordings will release Saint Leonard’s Horses’ debut album Good Luck Everybody on 14 October 2016. Preorders are available now. 

After signing his recording contract in the shadow of William Blake’s grave in London, it was only a matter of time before this curious artefact would be brought into the world. It’s a record that started life in the Hollywood Hills with a detour through the Mojave Desert, a cabin in Nashville, and a gothic church on the Yorkshire moors, and that ended up being recorded at Childwickbury Manor in St Albans, the former home of director Stanley Kubrick. It’s an ungodly collision of big country sound and misty isle musings – as thrilling a listen as is the story of its conception. 

Produced by Nick Trepka and engineered by Jack Hobbs in a studio adjacent to Kubrick’s study, it allowed Saint Leonard to absorb the creative energy that has bounced around the building. Putting sounds down in the place where parts of famed movies The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut were filmed, as well as drawing inspiration from filmic memorabilia that has found resting places there, has lent an ominous quality to the record. You can hear it in the echoes of melancholy sweeping through the harmonica intro to ‘Well, Well, Well’, it seeps into the spaces and bends between notes on ‘Spooky Lover’, the tinkly of piano and strummed, dusty chords of ‘Goddess Of Electric Gold’, and the echoed piano stabs on ‘The Strangelove Hotel Suite’. 

But this isn’t the only palette available to Saint Leonard’s Horses, not by a long shot. ‘Long John Silver’ is an Americana-steeped bluesy riot, rhyming Hotel California with Johnnie Walker and leading with honky tonk piano. The build from fiddle drone to dynamic crescendo, borrowing from gospel, rendering drama with orchestral strides, warped guitar chimes and biting solos, it’s all storytelling via sound, soaked in experience.

And all of this is a whiskey and sawdust backdrop for Saint Leonard’s lucid, intoxicated, dream-like and twisted lyrics, depicting friendships ‘made in haunted houses’ to tales of Los Angeles. Fractured and surreal though they may sometimes be, his words just help bring scratchy, authentic sepia to life; often vibrant, sometimes violent, even bold and beautiful.  

Explaining further, Saint Leonard says: “I wanted to make a record that unflinchingly documented and almost forensically examined the extremely peripatetic and emotionally turbulent two years I had during the odyssey of its conception. To that extent the album is a self-analysing artefact of my psyche. I wanted it to express the intense polarities of the experience both internal and external, psychic and geographic, in all it's ecstatic, beatific, horrific, glamorous, occult, painfully narcissistic, quasi-mystical, robustly loving and ultimately redemptive wonder. 
Essentially: The feel good hit record of late Autumn/Winter 2016 (nee; Soundtrack the twilight of our species.)”

In the past few years Leonard has toured the UK and USA supporting and playing shows with Ryan Adams,  Father John Misty, Bob Dylan, The Strokes, Beck, The Libertines, Billy Bragg and Wolfmother. The live band then further honed their skills and the songs through extensive touring and festival appearances (including Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, The Great Escape, SXSW and British Summer Time in Hyde Park). Saint Leonard’s Horses will now unleash these fully-formed songs on live audiences wherever and whenever they can.

Live dates – more to be added:
JULY
20th - London @ The Victoria (Dalston)
31st - Port Eliot Festival
SEPTEMBER
3rd – The 1-2-3-4 Festival, London

PRE ORDERS AVAILABLE NOW:
Xtra Mile Recordings - https://www.smarturl.it/goodluck-xmr

"Hot new artist…definitely worth a listen!” – Daily Mirror
"The musical bastard love-child of  Beckett, Orwell and Ted Hughes" Huffington Post
"Sonically lying somewhere between Dylan and Lennon…quietly charismatic” GodIsInTheTV