The Veils has released the new single titled ‘Bullfighter (Hand of God)’, from the upcoming album ‘The Veils … And Out Of The Void Came Love’, dropping February 1st. Dirty with reality and glittered with soul, ‘Bullfighter (Hand of God)’, was born of pain and sings of suffering, yet this is done through the guise of originality and emotion conveyed through music. In it’s purist form. In an unaltered state. Not to be interpreted but to be felt. A soundtrack to a vivid yet unexplained emotion. This is what music is.
“During a non-covid related flu earlier last year, I was struck down with a debilitating 40° fever. While the fever was at its height I hallucinated I was a lumbering, wounded bull being cajoled by a sinewy figure dressed all in red. As I limped around the burning arena, he threw his knives into my back as my temperature went higher and higher. Needless to say, it was a bit of a rough night. Once my temperature dropped and I got some presence of mind back again, I wrote this song as a way to remember him.”
– Finn Andrews
Track Listing
- Time
- No Limit of Stars
- Undertow
- Bullfighter (Hand of God)
- The World of Invisible Things
- Epoch
- Diamonds and Coal
- Rings of Saturn
- Made from Love with Far To Go
- The Pearl (Part II)
- Someday My Love Will Come
- The Day I Meet My Murderer
- Between the Ocean and the Storm
- I’ve Been Waiting
- Cradle Song
About The Veils
Following the release of Total Depravity, Andrews released a solo album and began a worldwide tour. One night, while lashing out at a particularly intense moment on piano, he broke his wrist on stage. “It sounds wild and Jerry Lee Lewis-esque, but it was an absolute fucking nightmare,” Andrews says. He played on and finished the rest of the tour, but it wasn’t until he got it examined much later that he realized what a bad move that was. “The scaphoid bone in my wrist had died, which I didn’t know was possible. My sister said that at least it was a really ‘on brand’ injury for me.”
Finn’s convalescence meant a lengthy hiatus from touring, so he did what he does best and stayed at home and wrote songs. “I was in a cast and couldn’t use my right hand. I sang the melody lines, then recorded the right hand piano part, then the left hand part. It might have been an interesting, avant-garde process if it wasn’t also just profoundly annoying.”
Just when his hand had healed sufficiently for him to play again, The Veils found themselves in need of a new record label but Finn set about starting to make a new record regardless. Producer Tom Healy invited Finn to his small studio underneath the old Crystal Palace ballroom in Mount Eden, and they listened through the legions of songs he had amassed throughout the previous year.
By the time the songs had been recorded, it was clear that arranging the album into two halves best suited such varied material – but the meaning of the songs as a whole still eluded Andrews. “Then my daughter was born, and suddenly the whole record made sense to me,” he says. The music was telling a story, and somewhat strangely for The Veils, it seemed to have a happy ending.
The result of all these years of questioning, confinement and precarious uncertainty is the magnificent new double album from The Veils … And Out Of The Void Came Love. It is an album intended to be listened to in two sittings with a short break in the middle, or as Andrews instructs: “Make a coffee or smoke a cigarette – but don’t mow the lawn or go to the movies or something, that takes too long.”
Featured image by Matt Hollyoak.