“I want to get the fuck out of here NOW” is the panic-stricken sentiment behind Gazelle Twin’s searing new single, “Hobby Horse” – serving up the first lick of her latest album Pastoral, out on September 21st via the artist’s own label, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray.
The single compliments a hotly-tipped premiere and headline performance at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham, on 23 June.
“Hobby Horse”’s rousing and mantra-like spoken style – first heard in the body-dysmorphia inspired album Unflesh (2014) and later in her touring A/V live show Kingdom Come – accompanies crazed galloping, incoherent, angry stadium chanting and eerie high-pitched howls.
In keeping with her ever-morphing performance persona, Gazelle Twin is now clad in red and white, head to toe, the colours of a familiar flag. A nod to deep and recent history; a jester-come-morris dancer. A post-pagan hooligan riding its Hobby Horse or conjuring terror with its pipe. Like a modern-day Commedia Dell’Arte caricature, she reveals the madness and violence of “ye olde” traditions slammed within contemporary cliches.
Bernholz explains, “Pastoral is an album that juggles British identities. A musing on how a sordid past becomes “quaint”… and that there is horror in every Idyll.”