Watch the new video for ‘Hypnotic Regression’ by Girls Names, premiered at Dazed Digital.

Dir. Nick Thompson

‘Hypnotic Regression’ is taken from Girls Names’ second album, The New Life, out now. Buy The New Life on iTunes here.

Tour dates
May
12th - Nuits Botainique, Brussels, Belgium
13th - Radio 1 Big Weekend/BBC Introducing Live, Derry
15th - 100 Club, London w/ Merchandise - SOLD OUT
16th - Great Escape @ Coalition, Brighton
17th - MKC, Skopje, Macedonia
18th - Plissken Festival, Athens, Greece
June
1st - Forbidden Fruit, Dublin - tickets
August
17th - Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales

Sooner…

Coming soon…

Girls Names have announced some more European shows. See below for a full list:

12th April - The Belfast Barge, Belfast
12th May - Nuits Botainique, Brussels, Belgium
15th May - 100 Club, London w/ Merchandise
16th May - Great Escape @ Coalition, Brighton
17th May - MKC, Skopje, Macedonia
18th May - Plissken Festival, Athens, Greece
1st June - Forbidden Fruit, Dublin
17th August - Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales

Girls Names - ‘The New Life’ (Live at Cameo, Brooklyn, 10th March 2013)

Girls Names - ‘The Olympia’ (Live at Cameo, Brooklyn, 10th March 2013)

“The New Life is a must listen” – NME (8/10)
“A minor-chord menace” - Q (4/5)
“Girls Names is slowly becoming a band for all seasons” – Pitchfork
“Girls Names make sadness moreish and hypnotic” - The Fly (4/5)
“A marvellously murky, ill-tempered rush before impending doom” - Noisey
“In terms of a band upping their game, it’s a bit like when Deerhunter followed Turn It Up Faggot with Cryptograms” - Dazed & Confused
“The result is a stylish, intelligent record that does exactly what it set out to do: Girls Names have reinvented their sound and come up smelling of roses.” - BBC (8/10)
”The New Life is the perfect soundtrack for this winter of discontent” - AU (8/10)
”this album will announce to the world that they’re a band with big ambitions” - the 405
”If you weren’t already enthused by Belfast’s Girls Names now is the time, their second album is their best yet” - Nialler 9 (Album of the Week)
“The New Life is a frontrunner for one of the best albums of the year so far” - Irish Times

Girls Names - The New Life - out now

iTunes (w/ bonus track)
Amazon
Rough Trade
Tough Love (CD)
Tough Love (v.ltd white vinyl LP - second pressing ships 4th March)

New Girls Names T-shirts available to buy on their forthcoming European tour from Tuesday.

“The New Life sounds like a gag loosened, a voice finally unsilenced” - NME, 8/10

Ahead of its release next week, Dazed Digital are streaming the new Girls Names album, The New Life.

Buy The New Life
iTunes
Amazon
Tough Love

Girls Names in this week’s NME.

The band tour from February

February
16th - The Menagerie, Belfast
21st - The Grand Social, Dublin
22nd - The Cockpit, Leeds
24th - Broadcast, Glasgow
25th - The Castle Hotel, Manchester
26th - Sebright Arms, London
27th - Point Ephemere, Paris
March
2nd - Sala Apolo, Barcelona
3rd - Astoria, Torino
4th - Circolo degli Artisti, Rome
5th - Mascotte, Zurich
6th - MuZ, Nuremberg
8th - Magnet Club (Karrera Klub), Berlin
9th - De Neiuwe Anita, Amsterdam

Girls Names - The New Life - CD/LP

Buy LP

Buy CD

“On their upcoming LP The New Life, Northern Ireland’s Girls Names are moving past the grey-hued ramshackle pop of their 2011 debut Dead to Me— says frontman Cathal Cully, in a press release, “Dead to Me literally was dead to us by the time it was committed to wax.” New Life, meanwhile, goes for a darker sprawl with bits of shadowy psychedelia, as shown on “Pittura Infamante”, its title referencing the Italian Renaissance genre of defamatory painting.” - Pitchfork

‘Pittura Infamante’ is taken from Girls Names’ forthcoming album, The New Life, out 18th Feb.

Pre-order The New Life here - itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-new-life/id582840781

Girls Names - The New Life
Released: 18th February 2013
Tough Love/Slumberland

Belfast-based four-piece Girls Names are a singular proposition, both geographically and psychically removed from their contemporaries at home and abroad. Released on 18th February, their second album The New Life is the sound of a band on the fringes striving to forge their own path, purposefully out of step - and time - with their surroundings. Weighed heavy with the grey landscapes of their hometown, The New Life is isolation laid bare, shot through with an undeterred sense of purpose and individuality.

Having released a series of singles and EPs on various independent labels, Girls Names made their first significant impression on the wider world in 2011 with their debut album, Dead To Me, earning plaudits from the likes of Pitchfork, NME and Loud & Quiet amongst a host of others. And yet, despite all the praise heaped on it, as soon as that record was released Girls Names were already moving into a different headspace.

The band’s performance at this year Primavera festival provided them with their first real opportunity to showcase the songs that were to comprise The New Life. The sunshine backdrop of the Spanish coastline offered a somewhat incongruous setting to the eerie dissonance of the new material, a kind of trial by fire metamorphosis rapturously received. Following a tour of Europe, the band returned home to record the album over a series of months. Having been produced by singer and songwriter, Cathal Cully, they’ve managed to capture that sense of otherness the performances at Primavera hinted at. The expansion to a four piece means the garage-clatter of the spritely pop songs of their debut have been replaced by a deeper, shadowy exercise in catharsis, driven by repetition, psychedelia and Dionysian crisis. And the record was born of a weighty concept too, as Cully explains:

“The New Life is not an over night change for Girls Names - just over two years in fact. Dead To Me literally was dead to us by the time it was committed to wax. But it’s a learning curve. We started moving on as artists the moment we finished that recording session, maybe even before. Not to dwell on the past, The New Life is what happens when you reset everything back to zero and start again, but try to perfect. It starts back at zero the minute the needle hits the groove but we’re also starting back from zero once the needle lifts at the end of the record. Ad infinitum. The New Life is what follows now.”

The album’s title track, and the first single to be taken from the album, is an ideal entry point. Just shy of 8 minutes long, it rotates around a hypnotic bass line, and in Cully’s evocation of renaissance, offers a perfect metaphor for the album as a whole. New single ‘Hypnotic Regression’ - available to stream today - reflects another side to the record. The reverb-heavy guitars and compelling melody are immediately memorable, but there are signs of experimentation, too; the white squall of the lead break; the uneasiness in the vocal echoes that furnish the verses. As such, The New Life, stands as a brave statement; the mark of the band untying themselves from the past and easing forth into the unknown.

The New Life will be released on February 18th on Tough Love (UK) and Slumberland (US).