Let’s stay in Dunedin some more… it’s home! A new release from Birdation started this run of posts. As noted two posts back Birdation’s Hope Robertson is better known for being the guitarist in Bad Sav and Dunedin’s post-punk+electronic slow-motion dance band Death And The Maiden. There’s finally a new, third album coming out from DATM, called “Uneven Ground”. The first single ahead of that release is “Leanest Cut”.

Bassist and vocalist Lucinda King is the bedrock here, musical guide and storyteller. Guitarist Hope Robertson weaves swooping, soaring motifs and guitar noise to build analogue atmosphere for this alternate world. Danny Brady’s beats mix old-school drum machines with electronic tones and distortion, amniotic synths and and field recordings.

“Leanest Cut” is an blurred moment in uncertain time, washed through with psychic unease and expressing the existential uncertainty that comes with both the passage of time and symptomatic of everything we have all been through these past 5 years.

Death In The Maiden’s eponymous 2014 debut was followed by the glorious and lushly detailed “Wisteria” in 2018. “Leanest Cut” here suggests the new album “Uneven Ground” will be a step up and outwards sonically, even as the lyrics turn more inward than the epic worlds evoked in some of the songs in “Wisteria”. All the familiar elements each person in the trio brings to their distinctive sound remain intact; at once familiar, but also different, like a new skin.

There’s also a video for the song, filmed by photographer Chris Schmelz in one of the bays around Port Chalmers using 16mm film that expired in the mid 60’s and hand-processed using caffenol in the laundry of his house. The white lawn furniture submerged in the water belonged to Lucinda’s nan and the video is a kind of cathartic reverence to the swirl of grief and memories she was feeling at that time.

While you are down the Death And The Maiden rabbit hole make sure you visit Thorn Dells, Lucinda King’s music with Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital). Their album “Silicon Pink” is one of the great unheralded masterpieces of Dunedin’s darkwave electronic pop scene, and an ideal companion piece to the works of Death And The Maiden.