Sometimes the best songs arrive by accident. The Veils’ new single Aurora was written as it was being recorded — a rare thing, by frontman Finn Andrews’ own admission — on a day when a huge geomagnetic storm swept over parts of New Zealand and the resulting aurora filled the papers with photographs. “Sometimes things are so beautifully simple,” he says, and the song carries that simplicity with it.
Aurora is the second single from Fragile World, The Veils’ forthcoming album out 19th June on V2 Records, following lead single Lungs. It arrives with a music video from award-winning director Alexander Gandar, and together the two singles are painting a picture of an album that sounds genuinely urgent and alive in a way that’s hard to manufacture.
That urgency makes sense given how Fragile World was made. Recorded live to tape in New Zealand by Paddy Hill and produced by Tom Healy — whose credits include Tiny Ruins, The Chills and Folk Bitch Trio — the album was built from a place of deliberate uncertainty. The band went into the studio with songs but no fixed arrangements or instrumentation, just a few weeks to figure it out.
“It was truly exciting having no idea what this record would sound like and only a few weeks to figure it out,” Andrews says. “It’s mostly Tom and I playing everything, with Joseph McCallum coming in at times. It was all very instinctual, quite full-on, and scary at times — but a good kind of scary, not scary like the real world out there.”
The album’s title holds two meanings at once — a reflection on a moment when institutions seem to be crumbling around us, and a metaphor for the act of creation itself, where thousands of small decisions gradually coalesce into something finished and whole. Both feel apt right now, and both give the record a weight that goes beyond the music.
Fragile World is out 19th June. The Veils are also heading out on a ten-date New Zealand tour — full details in our tour piece.
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