Gin Wigmore will release her new album Blood To Bone through Island Records on October 2, 2015. The record follows the double-platinum 2013’s Gravel & Wine, which spawned hit singles including ‘Man Like That’, synced to a Skyfall-themed Heineken advertisement, in which Gin appeared alongside Daniel Craig’s James Bond. The album will be preceded by lead single ‘New Rush’- written with producer Charlie Andrew (Alt J, Sivu) – available on July 27.
You sense Wigmore has come some distance since her accidental teenage entry into music, when her elder sister entered Gin’s self-penned song into the U.S.’s prestigious International Song-writing Competition (previous winners include Gotye & Passenger). The song- ‘Hallelujah’, written in response to the death of her father- went on the win the Grand Prize, in the process making Wigmore the only unsigned winner in the competition’s history. The coup proved to be no fluke when Wigmore’s debut EP Extended Play went platinum in NZ, with Ryan Adams’ band The Cardinals subsequently signing on for recording duties across her first album Holy Smoke.
New release Blood To Bone sees Wigmore turning the tables on the circumstances in which the double-platinum selling Gravel & Wine was written. The Auckland resident had decamped from her native New Zealand to America’s Deep South whilst writing Gravel & Wine, where a search for a better understanding of the Blues led to co-writes with Stax alumni William Bell, later borne out in the record’s classic-referencing sensibility. Wigmore’s latest release however, finds her now resident in Los Angeles (newly married to hardcore outfit LetLive. frontman Jason Butler), with an album recorded between London, Australia and downtown L.A. Whilst Blood To Bone bears the fruits of Wigmore’s song-writing this time refracted through American culture from the inside out, it was the leftfield odd-pop of 4 Leeds Uni students which lit the touch paper on her new record. Obsessed by the unorthodox approach to sounds across Alt J’s Mercury-nominated debut An Awesome Wave, Gin left the West Coast for London to acquire the services of the man behind that album’s production credits, Charlie Andrew.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWg0JxCD8BI
Having originally envisaged Andrew as the new album’s producer, during sessions at Brixton’s Iguana Studios (where he recorded An Awesome Wave) his input soon evolved into a song-writing based collaboration. ‘The idea of us co-writing together was unexpected for us both’ recalls Gin, ‘Because Charlie is largely known for producing, we were both sort of in the deep end with each other’. The success of the partnership however, is evident in the Wigmore/Andrew co-write ‘New Rush’, which fuses Wigmore’s unmistakeable gravelly vocals to semi-tonal synth fuzz and barrelling off-beat drums which reflect a love for the grand-scale drama of Woodkid’s album. ‘Charlie sort of opened a door for me to see I could do it myself- he played a huge role in terms of changing my headspace and showing me what is possible with electronic sounds. Charlie showed me about 808s, loops, pedals and samples- all this manipulation of sound that I had never know about before’.
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