The Golden Hour

The Golden Hour release follows on from the previously released singles within the album The Red Book co-composed by Brian Eno, ‘Wits End’ and a double single drop of ‘Martini Symphony’ and ‘Threshold’. Kieran (Saint Leonard) said of the album “I was trying to make music that sounded nothing like any music ever heard before. Which, of course, inevitably leads to the transect of the meridian with Bowie and Eno’s work in Berlin, because that is still fundamentally the benchmark when you come to new musical forms.” Wanting the album to have a “Berlin sound”, Kieran travelled to Germany just as lockdown hit in the UK.

During a book reading with his friend in Berlin, novelist Rob Doyle, a chance encounter with Alex and Nathan (Fat Whites) saw the formulation of the band and team that were responsible for creating The Golden Hour. Kieran recalled ‘That night we went out to the various clubs in the area because Berlin had yet to lockdown and Alex and I had this momentous, slightly altered, three-and-a-half-hour conversation. Then Nathan leaned n, having not said a word all night, and said: ‘But tell me, do you believe in god?’” With god, or certainly fate, on our side, we reconvened two days later at the Gaswerksiedlung studios, overlooking a toxic waste dump where we wrote side one of The Golden Hour in one sitting.’

The Golden Hour is a record that pulls you deep into its own fractured state of mind, through the two sides of Low-via-the Labyrinth soundtrack phantasmagoria of Wit’s End, into the zombie Adam Ant nightmare of Bells and Ecstasy and out the other end of closer Marlon Brando’s nihilistic synth pop grandeur. Yet for all the intensity of these fever dreams, there are frequent chinks of light in the darkness and knowing smiles peering from the doorway. The Golden Hour looks set to propel Saint Leonard into the next.