JOHN - NEW ALBUM, NOCTURNAL MANOEUVRES, OUT NOW!

JOHN’s NEW ALBUM, NOCTURNAL MANOEUVRES, OUT NOW ON BRACE YOURSELF RECORDS & PETS CARE.

Today, JOHN - the virtually ungoogleable moniker for London duo John Newton (drums, lead vocals) and Johnny Healey (guitar, backing vocals) - release their long-awaited third album, Nocturnal Manoeuvres, via the band's own Pets Care imprint and Brace Yourself Records.

Across ten tracks, it finds the duo expanding upon their celebrated idiosyncrasies once more. It sees them returning to their trusted producer Wayne Adams (who was behind the boards for both of their previous albums) knowing his success in capturing their presence as a live band. Realising the expansive quality of the resulting recordings, they then enlisted mastering engineer Sarah Register (Protomartyr, Future Islands, Chastity Belt) in order to deliver the sense of space that the varied track-list deserved. The result is a colossal body of work – one that moves easily between cinematic post-rock, elastic post-hardcore and pummelling noise rock.

Earlier this week, the band shared the album's final pre-release single: the frenetic, impressively angular 'Stadium of No' - all spiked riffs, overdriven interludes and soaring choruses, packed into a tight, sub three-minute runtime. It came alongside an excellent video directed by Henry Dartnall and Thomas Bonsu-Dartnall (aka The House of Lords) of Young Knives fame, which finds the duo acting on behalf of JOHN.

Speaking of the track and its relationship to Nocturnal Manoeuvres as a whole, Newton offers: “In parallel to the recurring motif of twenty-four hour work that runs throughout the album’s track listing, stadiums appear as hopelessly redundant monuments when they’re empty - only activated by the bodies that inhabit them. The song’s a nod to the often-overwhelming conditions of our present: a stadium-like crowd of opinions trying to shout on top of one another."

"There’s a real mechanical quality to the instrumentation in the song - it’s almost got shades of Devo in there. I feel there’s an interesting contradiction between the human strive for metronomic perfection and the reality of our biology. There’s simply no way we can be flawless when our bodies are in constant change,” adds Healey.

Other singles taken from the record include 'Non-Essential Hymn' (check out a stellar session version of it here), 'Šibensko Powerhouse' - which features a guest spot from IDLES' Adam Devonshire and came accompanied by an excellent video directed by Ryan Gander OBE featuring animatronic mice and cockroach costumes - and the titanic 'A Song For Those Who Speed In Built-Up Areas', the latter two of which both reached the A-list at BBC 6Music. Between them, the singles have garnered praise at press including from The Guardian, NPR, DIY, Loud and Quiet, The New Cue, Upset Magazine and many more.

Nocturnal Manoeuvres is the follow-up to their second LP, 2019's Out Here On The Fringes, which catapulted them into the Top 40 of the UK Independent Vinyl Chart, was featured as an Album of the Day on BBC 6Music with three successive playlisted singles, and saw the band hit the road with the likes of METZ and Mclusky.

Following recent festival appearances including Green Man and End of the Road, the band are currently on a mammoth tour of the UK before hitting the continent in 2022. As venues continue to reopen, it offers a captivating chance to catch a band who've built a devoted following through the sheer energy of their live show: a celebration of the primal intensity of the guitar-drums duo as a format and a monument to idiosyncrasy, which is exactly the sort of manifesto you could attach to Nocturnal Manoeuvres as a whole.

WATCH THE VIDEO FOR 'STADIUM OF NO' HERE:

JOHN - Nocturnal Manoeuvres // Out Now - Brace Yourself/Pets Care Records

1. Return to Capital

2. Šibensko Powerhouse

3. A Song for Those Who Speed in Built-Up Areas

4. Haneke'd

5. Austere Isle

6. Jargoncutter

7. Stadium of No

8. Power Out for the Kingdom

9. Northwood Turret

10. Non-Essential Hymn

Buy Nocturnal Manoeuvres on vinyl, CD, cassette or digitally here: https://ffm.to/john-nocturnalmanoeuvres