Smoke Fairies’ new self – titled album, combinines their classic approach whilst exploring new forms of musical expression – but it is an album that they nearly didn’t make. There was a moment after the release of Blood Speaks (2012) when Jessica Davies turned to musical partner Katherine Blamire and told her she was no longer sure whether Smoke Fairies should continue. The suggestion of not playing music together would potentially impact more than just their band – theirs was a friendship forged by music, by a shared ambition that had carried them from their schooldays and on to songwriting and performing together.

“We started considering what would we do if we didn’t do music,” recalls Davies, “and it was just a massive void.” Deciding that giving up on the band was “not an option,” Davies wrote a musical apology to Blamire that would become the opening track of the new album. “I just wanted to say sorry to her, ” Davies explains, “sorry I scared you like that.”  Smoke Fairies is set for release in North America on May 6th on Full Time Hobby (with an April 14th release date in EU).

In the six years since Smoke Fairies first entered a recording studio, they have made two albums, supported on tours with Bryan Ferry, Richard Hawley and Laura Marling, and had a single released on Jack White’s Third Man Records. Blamire talks of secretly listening to pop music on the bus, trying to figure out what made it good, etc.  For Davies, her own personal yardstick had become “anything with a drumbeat that made me dance around the kitchen.”  Smoke Fairies yearned to make an album that wasn’t simply recorded live, but rather presented songs that were pored over, puzzled-out, refined and produced. “We wanted to feel that we had dissected everything back to its basic bones,” avers Davies, “and then for every song to kind of shimmer.”

Smoke Fairies
Out May 6th on Full Time Hobby (April 14th EU)

Tracklist:
We’ve Seen Birds
Eclipse Them All
Shadow Inversions
Hope Is Religion
Waiting for Something to Begin
Your Own Silent Movie
Misty Versions
Drinks and Dancing
Koto
Want It Forever
The Very Last Time
Are You Crazy

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