Today we release the More Hell EP digitally, and on all streaming platforms. A companion piece to our 7th album All Hell, featuring reworked versions of 5 songs from the record, plus a cover of a favourite song.

Maybe it’s self indulgent but we love the album’s strings, and the sax, and all the intimate details that can get lost in a fuller arrangement. Stripping the songs back to these skeletal versions allows all those elements and great musicians to come to the fore. Tom and I re-recorded guitars and vocals to better suit the restrained instrumentation, and that brought us to these pretty renditions.

Wait by the Secret Stars has been one of my favourite songs for two decades. I first encountered it when a friend included it on a mixtape for me as a teenager. For years, this tape dub was the only way I had of listening to the song, and I’d play it over and over. Clunk-rewind-etc. A little later I’d buy the Death Cab ‘You Can Play These Songs with Chords’ CD and was struck by lightning when I surprisedly heard their version. I loved this too and it became a staple of the love letter mix CDs I’d make for others. At some point I found a trashy mp3 on Soulseek, but would keep going back to the tape until 2012 when somebody uploaded the original version of the song to YouTube – a rip of the vinyl audio, playing atop a video of the 7” spinning on a turntable. It feels kind of perfect that the original, 30 years since its release, still hasn’t made its way to streaming. I hope our version will find a place on playlists you send to others to keep this cycle going.

The EP is available on all streaming platforms, and you can download it from Bandcamp.