Once described by pitchfork’s Stuart Berman as a Pop-Noir outfit, The Veils is making a somewhat unexpected return after a 6-year absence, releasing “Undertow” -a poetic metacommentary on songwriting- as an enteré for their upcoming new album. Undertow is a moody and highly cinematic piece, with a dreary atmosphere that no doubt will evoke in many listeners’ memories of their inclusion by David Lynch in the 2017 Twin Peaks Revival.
Lead Singer and songwriter of The Veils, Finn Andrews, is without a doubt one of the most underrated male singers of our time. he is incisive yet mysterious, always closely associated with Nick Cave in the mind of music critics. He performs with a paradoxically-subdued intensity, like great igneous tension threatening to break the telluric veil in a cavalcade of raw emotion, but rarely ever daring to let it all out, relying instead on that same tension as the driving force beyond his songwriting. if there’s such a thing as a typical male singer, he isn’t necessarily “it”, but he is nonetheless a quintessential masculine voice that deserves to be studied by many rising contemporaries. I believe that one of his best performances so far is to be found in The Veil’s newest song, “Undertow”.
Though Andrews doesn’t break out in self-aggrandizing bouts of vocal belting and other flourishes, his intensity does spill over onto his live performances, even his body language on stage is like that of a vessel about to burst wide open in total catharsis. One such event happened one night during a worldwide tour of his solo album, in which he broke his wrist during a particularly fervent piano set. The injury would accompany him through the rest of the tour, and at some point the outlook was probably rather grim for The Veil’s future.
“In the year before I started writing this album, I really didn’t think I’d ever write another album again. I was done. I’d irreparably broken my wrist on stage. Then this song came shimmying down the drainpipe, and it really seemed to be willing me to carry on. It is, embarrassingly enough, a song about writing songs, written at what I admit was a pretty low ebb for me emotionally. Both my parents are writers, and though I am grateful to it for the life it continues to afford me, it is a complex genetic inheritance.”- Finn Andrews
After a lengthy recovery process fortunately involving a lot of songwriting, The Veils found themselves needing a new Record Label while simultaneously recording everything beforehand. The process was arduous and spotty, it took two years to get everything in the midst of the Pandemic and the Birth of Andrews’ child; it was thanks to producer Tom Healy and his small studio underneath the old Crystal Palace ballroom in Mount Eden that the upcoming double album”… And Out Of The Void Came Love” began to really take shape
