“You dig your finger nails deep beneath my skin. I am the broken earth, you were the cold bitter wind”
Cinematic Southerners New Desert Blues have shared new track “Milk & Honey,” and not for the first time. The six-piece first shared it as a demo back in April last year but they introduced the fully mastered final version this week which will feature as the opening track of their long awaited debut album, To Be My Own, due on January 29th. Torn between recording a second EP or a full length album, the band had had enough material for a while and felt the time was right.
Retreating to the isolated Vale Studios in Worcestershire where phone reception was non-existent, the Hampshire band worked on a whole batch of songs alongside producer Anthony West (one half of Oh Wonder) after admitting their debut Devil’s Rope EP, released back in January 2014, was retrospectively a little one dimensional – hardly a surprise when all four tracks plus their debut single before that were all titled boy’s names (Adam, Zachary, Matthew, Christoph and Eli).
“Milk & Honey,” then, does not only depart from this theme but also from the plaintive and measured sound of their previous piano-oriented, harmony-laden works. This latest single has a much more aggressive tone, a compliment to the steely vocals, heavy guitar dirge and pounding drums. Having expanded their blues-meets-folk sound, “Milk & Honey” is the first taste of an album that will contain both light and dark, and fast and slow songs as confirmed in a ‘making of’ video available to watch below.
