The New Eves, Live in Leeds

Name: The New Eves, Live in Leeds
Start: 2025-09-16T19:30:00+01:00
End: 2025-09-16T23:00:00+01:00
Location: Hyde Park Book Club

Schedule

Tue Sep 16 2025 at 07:30 pm to 11:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Hyde Park Book Club | Leeds, EN

Brudenell presents...
The New Eves
+ Special Guests TBA
16.09.2025 | £12.50 ADVANCE (stbf) | 19:30 Doors
https://theneweves.bandcamp.com/
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Up and down the venues of the country, from the grassroots basements of their adopted hometown of Brighton through to an ever-growing catalogue of sold out shows and magnetic festival sets, The New Eves have been steadily creating a word-of-mouth phenomenon.
Nestled somewhere between primal rock’n’roll live performance and transcendent ritual, there’s an unmistakable alchemy that happens when Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mager (bass, vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals) step onto a stage together. It’s a boundless, uninhibited kind of magic that feels completely new; that’s writing its own rulebook for how to exist - as a band, as women, as humans in the world - from the ground up.
“The space we go into when we perform feels quite far away from regular life. It takes a lot out of us and we really go into this other dimension, so it’s amazing that we can bring people there with us,” says Ella. “The live show is what’s got us everywhere - we had barely any music out, it was all so underground, but people just wanted to come and they’ve never stopped coming.”
Now, they’ve distilled this visceral energy into their extraordinary debut The New Eve Is Rising: a lightning rod of inspiration channelled by a quartet with the ability to create something greater than the sum of their parts. “This project has been [about] us redefining ourselves, and we hope anyone who’s listening can be inspired by that,” says Nina, as Ella nods: “We’re seeing how far we can go as four people by creating our own mythology.”
Everything about The New Eves’ formation and evolution has been as a result of this almost fated sense of something bigger at play. Violet, Ella and Nina had become friends through a circle of female creatives meeting up in Brighton in the early aftermath of lockdown, while Kate - a mutual friend of Violet and Ella - joined soon after. At the same time, all four found themselves recently divorced from their previous musical projects and with the urge to make something new. “Ella didn’t even play the drums, Violet had been playing violin for about a week, but this thing started to happen almost out of our control,” Nina recalls. “It could only have been this arrangement of people because it happened at that exact time,” Kate nods.
Ella describes the entity of the band as “like a Venn diagram, and then in the centre is a different person”. Lyrically, that centre sees them questioning the accepted status quo; “rewriting stories and myths that get told in society” into something altogether more curious and progressive. Visually, it lies in a Pinterest board full of reference points from seminal films (The Virgin Suicides, Star Wars, The Colour of Pomegranates) to handmade crafts to historical radicals like Joan of Arc.
Musically, meanwhile, it takes their untamed melting pot of musical styles - an instinctive, incendiary mix of Patti Smith radical poetry, rock’n’roll recklessness, freak folk experimentalism and plenty more - and somehow turns it into a collection of clarion calls that you can still hum. It’s completely immersive; a whole world to dive into that’s taken on a life of its own. “We’re all adhering to The New Eve entity of the band,” Ella notes. “The band knows what it wants.”
The New Eve Is Rising was written in Brighton and at an artistic residency at The Cornish Bank, and recorded at Rockfield Studios and Bristol’s Cotham Parish Church. Across its nine tracks are references to highwayman’s caves and 12th Century lovers Heloise and Abelard; to krautrock and Swedish cow calls and, on the slow, purposeful march of “Mary”, lyrics whispered into a bat detector. The band call what they make Hagstone Rock. “There’s a lot of mythology around a hagstone, and it’s different in different places, but generally if you look through the hole of hagstone you can see the truth,” says Ella. “We see ourselves as a rock band, but there’s a lot of depth in there and putting hagstone in front of it felt better.” Pause. “It also has the word ‘hag’ in it, which we really identify with…”
Opening track “The New Eve” acts as something of a manifesto: an atmospheric incantation and an open door into their world. “The New Eve is of earth / Granite, ochre, magma, dirt / All the bones in her body are holy / All the stones in her pockets are homely”. There is a defiance there, but it’s one that’s open to all. “Anyone of any gender can redefine themselves,” says Violet. “It’s more like an expansion,” nods Ella. “Half the time, what we explore isn’t even about humans; it’s political in a really different way. It’s about animals and rocks and it’s so much bigger.”
Sometimes, as on lead single “Highway Man”, that means flipping the perspective in a way that feels intrinsically feminist. A darkly-energised retelling of Alfred Noyes’ classic 1906 romantic poem, The New Eves’ version is urgent and intuitive: a blistering slice of controlled musical chaos that rewrites the narrative. “In the original version it’s this dude, who’s being the dude, and the girl doesn’t do anything and then dies,” says Nina. “So I was like, ‘We can’t have that…’” However, on “Astrolabe” - written on a children’s toy accordion during their Cornwall sessions - the band look skyward. With references to Bonnie and Clyde and old Victorian lovers’ rings, the portal of this old celestial tool - “an early scientific instrument for telling the time and the tides and looking at the stars” - becomes a window into something bigger. “It’s the story of a great cosmic love,” says Violet.
“Rivers Run Red”, says Ella, started life “as this weird little song that Violet could do some dancing to”. An early Halloween version found them singing Patti Smith lyrics while Violet poured blood on herself on stage; now, it’s a fully-fledged New Eves song with flutes, mesmeric, circular bass lines and a Velvet Underground-esque type of hypnotism. Meanwhile, “Cow Song” moves at a purposeful walking pace, influenced by the Swedish practice of kulning - a way of projecting your voice to communicate with animals and the other shepherdesses. On the track, the band yelp in tribute. “We sang the introduction to a cow called Bonnie and her son in the field,” remembers Violet. “She tried to eat the microphone, gave it a lick.”
Bonnie makes an appearance on the final record, as do the sounds of camping cups being whacked and match boxes being struck. On one hand, there are classical instruments; on the other, Violet proudly describes her guitar style as “just weird noises and bashing”. The only thing that really matters is the feeling. “You can hit something and it can sound good. You can literally do anything and it’s fine. Sometimes, the more people play the more narrow it becomes in terms of what you ‘should’ do, but we’re just like, strike a match box, hit a camping cup…” laughs Violet.
“It’s the idea that you can do what you want - you don’t have to do things a certain way,” Nina says, summing up the revolutionary spirit of The New Eves and their debut. “When we made this band, we didn't know what to expect. No one gave us permission. You have to do that for yourself.”