Gazelle Twin announces details of a new album, Black Dog
GAZELLE TWIN
ANNOUNCES DETAILS OF HER FOURTH STUDIO ALBUM, BLACK DOG
OUT 27 OCTOBER ON INVADA RECORDS
AN ALBUM ABOUT CONFRONTATION, CHILDHOOD FEARS AND HOW THEY MANIFEST IN ADULTHOOD
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR THE TITLE TRACK
AUTUMN TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED
GAZELLE TWIN – aka composer, producer, singer, and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz – has announced details of a new studio album, Black Dog, set for release on vinyl, CD and digitally on 27 October 2023.
In her three studio albums to date, Gazelle Twin has looked out: out at cities, out from a tormented body, out at the squirming guts of rural Britain, but on her first album for new label, Invada Records, she turns her gaze inwards. Black Dog is an album about confronting fear, and the expectation that the things that lurked in the darkness when you were a child will disappear as you become an adult.
The album launches today with its subterranean title track, ‘Black Dog’, a song that’s half a dream, half a remembrance. The track’s whispered narrative takes its lyrical rhythms from the children’s books Bernholz reads to her children and, she explains, its title comes from a recurring figure from her childhood, “a small black dog’s shadow, blacker than black, moving by my bedside – not terrifying but lingering. Looping. Tailing. Restless. Keeping me awake” before going on to explain that “now as an adult I experience a different kind of insomnia in the pitch dark, another kind of black dog paces at night.”
Watch the video for ‘Black Dog’, directed by John Minton, here: https://youtu.be/53MuTe4HVfA
Talking about Minton’s work, Bernholz said, “I find the manifestations of AI very ghostly in nature, so it worked brilliantly for this film, incorporating the album cover illustration by Craig Humpston, interior walkthroughs and visual feedback. John’s film perfectly evokes the inky, looming and restless nature of childhood fear that inspired the song.” Minton goes on to say: “The track required the overriding atmosphere to be murky, dark, and ominous and then burst into life. The structure of the song guided the way whilst I fused Analogue and AI processing to create an unnerving dreamscape.”
Black Dog tells a story that unfurls like a film. It addresses how our childhoods shaped our adulthoods: how any sense of trauma and grief is burnished onto a person’s memories forever, however much we try and escape it. Black Dog suggests how these feelings return in particular intensity when a person becomes a parent, as they watch themselves pass things on that they wish they hadn’t, wish they wouldn’t.
In some ways, Bernholz is purging herself on this album. Unlike her masked characters for previous releases, her face is recognisable and, she explains, she is “not as removed this time” from her persona. She is imagining herself as a medium for the voices inside herself, rather than looking out to displace them with other ideas. She emerges huge and godly as she does so, her voice moving from delicate tenderness to doom-driven power.
This is an album where old stories have to be pillaged, digested, and regurgitated to write new ones, where we have to question ourselves utterly. Black Dog looks back and looks in and looks back and looks in. We enter as we listen. We turn ourselves inside-out altogether.
BLACK DOG TRACKLISTING
I Disappear
Sweet Dream
Fear Keeps Us Alive
Two Worlds
The Long Room
Unstoppable Force
This House
Author Of You
Walk Through Walls
A Door Opens
GAZELLE TWIN – 2023 TOUR
10 November – London, Bush Hall
16 November – Newcastle, Sage 2
24 November – Brighton, ACCA
10 November – London, Bush Hall
16 November – Newcastle, Sage 2
24 November – Brighton, ACCA
Tickets are on sale now
Pre-order Black Dog: https://lnk.to/RsNoMLE9
‘Black Dog’ video: https://youtu.be/53MuTe4HVfA
PRAISE FOR GAZELLE TWIN’S PASTORAL
“…belonging to a proud tradition of English satire, plumbing the depths of the nation’s psyche and twisting it to wryly discomforting ends” – Pitchfork
“…could be her best to date”. The Quietus
“…could be her best to date”. The Quietus
“…it takes serious mettle and a gimlet eye to make an album like this“ – 8* MOJO
“Menacing, nightmarish electronic vision of Albion” – Uncut
“She meshes penny whistle squeals, traditional English song and Punch and Judy shows into her aggressively latticed rhythms, creating a genuinely foreboding tension between Britain’s past and present” – The Guardian
EDITORS NOTES
Gazelle Twin is the performance moniker for Elizabeth Bernholz, a composer, producer, singer, and visual artist based in the UK. In 2009 Bernholz created this “transformative” performance persona to encompass; composition, studio albums, soundtracks, art installations and live performance, intended to openly address a deep-rooted aversion to traditional and contemporary norms across the music industry, particularly for women. Her ever-changing, identity-warping personas based on powerful, emotional themes and a fiercely independent spirit has driven her output and many collaborations since.
Bernholz has independently released three critically acclaimed studio albums to date; The Entire City (2011), Unflesh (2014), and Pastoral (2018), together with three soundtrack LPs from album off-shoot performance projects; Out of Body (2015), Kingdom Come (2017), and Deep England with NYX Electronic Drone Choir (2021). As a newly established soundtrack composer, her credits for Film, TV, and Video games include: AMC’s The Walking Dead, The Virtues (C4), Cyberpunk 2077, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (Netflix), Nocturne (Amazon/Blumhouse), The Power (BFI/Shudder) and Then You Run (Kudos/Sky). Her collaborations as vocalist and producer include Gary Numan, Halsey (through Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), Maxine Peake, Perc, Blanck Mass, DJ Dave Clarke and more.