26 April 2023 - 0 Comments

Tiny Ruins, the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook, release Out Of Phase, the final single to emerge ahead of forthcoming new album Ceremony, due April 28th. To celebrate, the band is embarking on an eight-date headline tour around Aotearoa next month. Tickets are on sale now from Banishedmusic.com.

A mineral rich song, seductive in both pace and its compact melodic punch, Out Of Phase is propelled by the interweaving lines of Fullbrook’s tumbling fingerpicked guitar work and Cass Basil’s hofner bass. It’s a unity which belies the track’s moody, questioning undercurrents - as Fullbrook puts it; Why do we fight, and where does it take us to? Where do phases of misalignment, seasons of unrest, leave us?

Listen to Tiny Ruins - Out of Phase

The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human – and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how you can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, and surface into another new morning. Another new chance. Ceremony washes in and takes you out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity,” says Fullbrook.

Although the things Fullbrook was struck by are annotated across Ceremony as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook, Ceremony is not a watercolour ramble through the natural world. These songs are not afraid of getting earth under the nails, of digging deep into some of the hardest matters of human existence. How do you move from loss and grief to acceptance and some kind of peace? How do you live knowing that you aresurrounded by forces far beyond your control?

Ceremony’s productions are maximal, deep, complex. No moment is squandered without a clever polyrhythm, a curious harmonic tension introduced, an unexpected timbre. The intuitive weave of instrumentation - from Alex Freer’s deft and inventive drumming and Basil’s conversational bass lines to Tom Healy’s lightening-strikes of electric guitar - land Fullbrook’s hard songs in an blissfully warm bedrock of sound - steadied in a kind of musical trust fall.

Cover Art Credit: Christiane Shortal
Photo Credit: Frances Carter

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