Jack and George Barnett don’t remember exactly when they first met Harley Weir, but they do remember what they liked about her work. “I think she has a way of making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar,” says George, the older of the twin brothers who make up These New Puritans, a band whose rise over the past two decades has seen them become one of the UK’s most beloved experimental acts. “And I think she’s the best photographer of our generation.”
While Weir is indeed now one of the most celebrated and in-demand photographers out there—shooting international magazine covers, blue-chip fashion campaigns, and establishing an impressively realized art practice on the side through exhibitions and monographs—back when she first established ties with These New Puritans, in the late 2000s, she was very much an upstart. “I think we were friends on Myspace at first, weren’t we? And then I saw you on the train, George, and introduced myself,” Weir remembers, laughing.
“It was a really formative time in our lives creatively—our work has always been in tandem without us realizing it, and there are a lot of similarities,” George says. “A lot of shared reference points.”
After mulling it over, Weir replies: “Yes, exactly. I think that’s the perfect way of putting it.”
While the three friends have seen their careers soar over the intervening years, they’ve returned to collaborate time and time again—notably on the ravishing visuals for These New Puritans’ career-best 2019 record, Inside the Rose, the album’s eerily romantic sound seamlessly translated into a series of surreal videos featuring Lynchian swirls of red velvet, nude bodies tangled together in pools of water, and glimpses of the two brothers walking through shadowy industrial basements. And as the band gears up to release their fifth record, Crooked Wing, next month, they’ve joined forces again on a series of new videos: first, for the Caroline Polachek–featuring “Industrial Love Song” in February—which was billed as a lover’s duet between two construction cranes—and today, with the Alexander Skarsgård–starring video for “A Season in Hell.”
First things first: How exactly did they get the award-winning Swedish actor to participate in the freaky, deliberately lo-fi visual, in which he runs across a gloomy, sodden field in southeast England and hurls himself into a muddy trench? It turns out that George and Skarsgård are old friends, and the actor is a long-time fan of Weir’s work.
“Over the past few years, I’ve been involved in several dark, dystopian projects,” Skarsgård tells me. “Of late, I’ve been feeling a growing desire for a palate cleanser—to do something light and fluffy that would be fun for the whole family to watch. Nothing screams ‘light and fluffy’ more than Harley Weir and These New Puritans, so I didn’t hesitate to jump aboard when this project sailed into my harbor.”
For George, it was a revelation to see his friend throw himself—both physically and emotionally—into the project so fiercely. “He is absolutely incredible in front of a camera, isn’t he, Harley? On set, I couldn’t believe it,” George says, with a touch of awe.
It was amazing,” Weir says. “He really performed. He asked to have more mud smeared on his face! He wasn’t precious at all. He genuinely threw himself into a grave. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve killed Alexander Skarsgård?!’”
George emphasizes that it was all real—no stunt doubles here—before beginning to describe the process Weir used to achieve the video’s rich texture…until she cuts him off. “Don’t give away my tricks, George!” she says, laughing.
The fact they know each other’s creative secrets is partly to do with how intimate their collaborative process is. First, they exchange movie recommendations or art history references over WhatsApp; then, a little further down the line, they meet up for tea to actually plan what the visual world surrounding the record might look like. “I often send Harley things really early on, back when it’s still demos,” George says.
Jack adds: “I think George is always optimistic about how quickly we’re going to finish things. Then, about two years later, we finally do it.”
When it came to Crooked Wing, those conversations flowed with a different kind of ease. On the surface, the album may appear to showcase a softer, more sensual side of These New Puritans: Where 2010’s Hidden’s thundering taiko drums, orchestral bombast, and snarled lyrics felt bold and bracing—and the fluttering woodwind and brass on 2013’s Field of Reeds shifted into more mysterious, gothic territory, infused with the ghosts of England past—on Crooked Wing, there are a number of songs that seem, at least on first listen, like straightforward love songs. That air of romance is only heightened by the album’s shimmering, celestial tone, whether thanks to the operatic melodies that weave their way through courtesy of Polachek, or the intricately embroidered sonic tapestry of bells and organs on tracks like “I’m Already Here” and “Bells.” Listen a little more closely, however, and the lyrics often veer toward tales of dystopia and doomed love and mortality. (There’s a reason the lead single was a romantic duet not between people, but between two pieces of machinery.) “We’ve all been thinking about similar things, in terms of life and death,” Jack notes.
The album’s opening song, “Waiting”—which begins with a plaintive, Benjamin Britten–esque solo chorister singing “I am waiting” over and over—resonated especially strongly with Weir. “I’ve been thinking a lot about death in my own life,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of people close to me pass away in the last few years, or people who were teetering on the edge of death. So it really hit a chord with me.”
That sense would inform the video for “A Season in Hell,” with its mysterious masculine figure hurling himself into an all-encompassing black lake of mud. “For me, the song made me think about my dad, who has Benson’s Disease, which is a very rare, very early-onset dementia, it’s not fully understood, but he’s no longer there in mind,” Weir goes on. “There’s something in the moment when Alexander Skarsgård goes into the darkness... For me, it was thinking about this idea of the spirit, when do we actually die? If your body’s still alive, but your brain seems to be gone, where are you? Heaven, hell, limbo? That’s what the film is about to me.”
The video also felt like something of a full-circle moment for the trio: the location on the windswept Isle of Sheppey, on the northern coast of Kent, bore an intentional resemblance to the Barnetts’ hometown of Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, to which Weir would travel to visit them many years ago and photograph some of their early press shots.
“That marshland, but with a lot of these industrial structures, is a landscape I really associate with the band,” Weir says. “The marshland is quite brutal in a way, but really beautiful. And there’s lots of mud. I feel like I fell in the mud a few times while visiting.”
All three of them note their shared interest in taking a sideways look at English stereotypes. “It’s English, but in a way that’s not obvious,” Jack says. “It’s not like the picture postcard vision of England, is it? It’s beautiful, but in a strange, austere way.”
It’s a sentiment that could apply to the work of These New Puritans as a whole, given their fascination with the country’s mystical and esoteric histories, and their ability to translate those interests into beguiling songs that may sound a little alien at first but quietly sneak up on you and lodge themselves firmly in your brain. The fury and urgency of “A Season in Hell,” though, reflects another equally important facet of the band: the exciting things that happen when they let go and dial their energy up to 11. “A lot of the album is quite quiet, but this song is on the other end of the spectrum,” Jack says. “At the time I wrote it, I was living next to a factory and next to a load of evangelical churches, so there was a lot of noise around me. And when there was too much noise, I felt like I had to compete with it and make something that was louder than the factories, the machinery, and all the people singing hymns. So this was one of those songs.” It might even, God forbid, sound like something you could dance to.
“It makes me want to move!” Weir confirms. “Whenever I listen to it, it gives me energy.”
On the subject of dancing: Charli XCX recently shouted the band out at Coachella as one of a series of musicians and film directors that could have the next “Brat summer.” So, how would they feel about a These New Puritans summer? (Or a Crooked Wing summer, if we’re being technical?)
“Oh, my God,” George says, with a laugh. “I don’t think that would be a very cheery summer. It would have to come with a rain cloud emoji. We’re going to rain on everyone’s parade.”
For Jack, releasing the album is simply about sharing the product of the last few years of their lives—and all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. How, then, does he hope people will receive it, These New Puritans summer or otherwise? “It’s hard to say,” Jack says, after a pause. “We just try to make the thing that we love. We don’t care whether it’s commercial or not—none of that matters. For better or worse, we make it how we feel it needs to be—and follow that thread all the way to the bitter end.”
