Into the woods with The New Eves

Their debut album The New Eve Is Rising is a heady and beautifully strange collision of stuff: pagan folk and poetic punk with a distinctly feminist point of view. Flutes, cello, battered percussion, looping bass lines, and lyrics that veer between the ritualistic and the nakedly personal – this is music that almost sounds unearthed, rather than written.

“We all met in Brighton, through music,” guitarist and cellist Nina Winder-Lind tells me. “We were just really looking for people to play music with and we found each other.” That initial spark quickly turned into something bigger. “It was like everyone in the room said, ‘I really want to be in a band again,’” she adds. “And then we were like – oh!”

Brighton has been both a creative incubator and a bit of a challenge for the group. They describe the scene as unusually supportive. “It’s a really nice container to grow in,” flautist and drummer Ella Oona Russell explains, “but you could pay £500 for a cupboard,” she adds, only half joking. It’s a place that forces bands to get resourceful, something The New Eves have turned into an art form.

From the beginning, their creative process has been less about planning and more about giving the songs a space to reveal themselves. “Most of our material we make together in the same room,” Winder-Lind explains. “We’ll have a jam and things will happen… between us in the space.” You can hear that looseness in the album: some tracks spiral and churn like spells being cast, others unfurl more slowly, drawing you into their world rather than pushing for attention.

They call their sound Hagstone Rock – an appropriately mythic label for music that references 12th-century lovers, the Bible, and highwaymen’s caves, while also pulling influence from krautrock, Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, and the accidental grandeur of DIY shows. It gives the music a timeless quality. They are not loyally revisiting these old stories but instead doing something more like rewilding them. Take their song “Highway Man”, for example: a reimagining of Alfred Noyes’ 1906 poem, warped into something darker, stranger, and freshly feminist.

Literature is a clear part of the band’s DNA. “Kate and Violet [the band’s other two members] studied English Literature,” Russell explains. “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s be literary,’ but we are all writers. Books play a big role in our lives. We get excited about books. We tell each other about books. And if I’m sad or anxious I go into the library and then I’m okay. We even want to start a book club!”

Many of their songs begin as poems – some date back to teenage notebooks – and get layered, deconstructed, and reassembled in rehearsal. “We can all go away and write something and it’ll tie together,” Winder-Lind says.

Songs sometimes begin their life by band members recording rehearsals on their phones – moments captured on the fly, then pieced together later. “We try to remember to record on our phones when we jam, and that’s kind of how we start to write a lot of our songs,” Winder-Lind admits.

“It’s like wrangling a horse,” Russell adds. “The song happens and you’re like – where the hell are we going?”

That chaos is a huge part of the band’s charm. “We really champion our chaos,” Russell says. “We all have a lot of it inside. When I’m drumming, I feel half out of control the whole time… I have to just crash out or explode. It’s like a car that’s gone off a cliff.”

Their live shows reflect that beautifully unruly spirit. How much was the idea of live performance in their mind when they recorded this album? “We definitely don’t think, ‘Oh, let’s do this on stage,’” says Russell. “It’s the other way around. We build the song and then realise what we’ve committed to bringing on tour.” Sometimes what they’ve committed to bringing on tour is a bit of a logistical nightmare, with band members shifting positions and juggling numerous instruments on small stages, crammed between amps and keyboards.

But hopefully once the album has been released, more of their staging ideas can be fully realised. “We have a lot of ideas for when we’re more in charge of the stage or the space… there is a lot you can do. Violet does dancing, for example… backdrops and things like that. There have been seeds of ideas for the future,” Russell says. “Maybe our banner dreams can come true.”

The band’s audiences are a mix of the devoted and the unexpected. Despite the distinctly feminist current running through The New Eve Is Rising, they’re quick to point out that the atmosphere is anything but exclusive. “Even though there is this big feminine element,” Russell says, “it’s actually very open and inviting.” Winder-Lind agrees: “We’ve had young boys come up to us like, ‘Wow.’ That’s really cool! It makes me really happy that it’s not such a closed group.”

Despite their growing following, the band are keen to connect with one group in particular: “We want to get to the teenagers,” they laugh. “We do have a TikTok now, but none of us have really ever been on it.” Russell adds, “I’ve literally never seen what TikTok looks like. It feels like too much!”

When asked what they want people to take from the album, they hesitate. “That’s not really up to us to say,” Winder-Lind explains. “What the New Eve is saying is, hopefully a lot of different people can identify with that character. She’s many different things.” There is a quiet resistance to over-explaining. They want the meaning to be discovered in the listening, not handed out in advance. “I don’t want to say too much,” Russell adds. “I want people to hear it and feel whatever they’re feeling.”

What emerges in conversation with The New Eves is that this is not a band trying to define themselves, but instead determined to explore. “This chaos,” Winder-Lind says, “it’s coming out because it needs to come out.”

“We’re going into the future,” Russell says. “It’s going to be different. We’ve been making all this music for such a long time without much public engagement… we really have no idea what to expect.”

And yet, the momentum feels inevitable. The New Eve marches on – somewhere under a hand-stitched banner, frayed at the edges, proudly DIY, and all the more powerful for it.