Release Date: 06/18/21

Indie pop comes of age. The Catenary Wires (ex-Heavenly) return with their new album 'Birling Gap.'

The Catenary Wires feature Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, once of Heavenly and Talulah Gosh. These early bands, once denigrated for being 'fey' or 'twee': the wrong kind of female, have been re-evaluated in recent years. Their songs, apparently sweet and fizzy, were always smarter and darker than they seemed, while the band were radically independent, and an influential part of the movement that became riot grrrl.

Birling Gap is a significant place. On the South Coast of England, it's where steep chalk cliffs resist the rough seas of the English Channel. It's where iconic images of England are created and re-created. A landscape beloved of patriots - the sturdy white cliffs standing proud and strong against the waves. It's also a place where people, despondent and doomed, have thrown themselves off the cliffs. It's where The Cure shot the Just Like Heaven video. It's where romantic lovers go for passionate storm-tossed assignations.

The album depicts England, not just in its lyrics, but also in its music. The Catenary Wires have listened to the songs and stories England has comforted itself with over the decades, and re-imagined them. Rob and Amelia take on the personae of duetting couples from different moments in pop history: in Canterbury Lanes, they are a pair of folk-rock musicians, old now and worn down, but still aspiring to put their band back together, hoping to rekindle the idealistic flames of the 1970s. (The arrangement hints at the acoustic guitars and harmonies of those long-lost Canterbury Scene bands.) Mirrorball, fizzy with syn-drums and Casio, presents another pair - middle-aged and unattached, who find unexpected love at a retro 80s disco. Lost in the maelstrom of commercial synth-pop, they find that, for the first time in their lives, those hackneyed expressions of love and desire actually do make emotional sense.