After more than five years, Purity Ring have returned to announce their third album, entirely produced and recorded by the duo of Megan James and Corin Roddick. Womb chronicles a quest for comfort, the search for a resting place in a world where so much is beyond our control. The striking vulnerability of “ruby insides” - “If I could, I would let you see through me” - charts a course that’s both intensely personal and deeply connected to those close to us, our kin whether by nature or nurture. As the ground shifts beneath their feet, Womb’s characters help one another face death, despair, and world-altering discovery with resilience and grace. For all the terrain it encompasses, Womb’s quest culminates in “stardew”, a glittering, transcendent invitation to “just be where you are” - to experience the kind of powerful peace that can only be found by truly coming home.

Womb follows Purity Ring’s 2012 internationally-acclaimed and highly influential debut Shrines and 2015’s another eternity. On another eternity, The New York Times praised the songs as “only a few steps removed from radio hits by singers like Ariana Grande and Ellie Goulding” while Rolling Stone called them “lustrous synth pop plus cavernous hip hop” and The New Yorker lauded the duo for “creat[ing] electro-pop that is as warm and human as it is cold and alien, an intoxicating combination that feels boldly futuristic.”

TRACK LISTING

Rubyinsides
Pink Lightning
Peacefall
I Like The Devil
Femia
Sinew
Vehemence
Silkspun
Almanac
Stardew

After sixty-five fortnights, Purity Ring have returned with their second album Another Eternity. The pair ventured home to the frozen industrial landscapes of their birthplace Edmonton, Alberta to document much of what was to become the album. For the first time, vocalist Megan James and producer Corin Roddick were able to create a record in the same room.

Purity Ring’s first album, 2012's Shrines, was recorded separately in Montreal and Halifax, where Corin and Megan were respectively living at the time. Despite being a thousand kilometers apart, Shrines was a cohesive, beguiling and wholly unique universe of what the band called ‘Future Pop’. At the center of the amniotic swirl of Shrines was an undeniable nucleus of crystalline pop which presciently suggested both indie and popular music to come. They quickly amassed a rabid fanbase, toured relentlessly and sold out shows worldwide, earning ‘Best New Music’ from Pitchfork and praise from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NPR, among others.

On Another Eternity, Purity Ring trade the gorgeously claustrophobic atmospheres of Shrines for wide-open, muscular vistas of sound and luminous, up-front vocals. Crafting a lyrical universe of “sweat and dreams” populated by seacastles, rattling spines, and weeping drawers, Megan James wields concrete imagery and metaphor with increasingly direct, startling resonance. Corin Roddick's gifts for evocative melody remain intact, but his drum work and use of space have been completely reforged: immaculately built and focused in service of the song.

Though they are now working at a higher resolution, Purity Ring remain hands-on with every aspect of their project. As usual, the band produced and recorded Another Eternity entirely themselves. 

Purity Ring are a Halifax / Montreal-based duo comprised of Corin Roddick and Megan James. Their debut album ‘Shrines’ will be released on 4AD.

Purity Ring make lullabies for the club, drawing equally from airy 90s R&B, lush dream pop, and the powerful, bone-rattling immediacy of modern hip hop. Megan’s remarkable voice is at once ecstatic and ethereal, soaring joyfully through Corin’s carefully chopped beats, trembling synths, and skewed vocal samples.

Despite the band’s young age (Corin is 21, Megan 24) and short gestation (they formed in late 2010), Purity Ring have delivered one of 2012’s most assured - and anticipated - debuts with ‘Shrines’. Indeed, ‘Shrines’ feels like anything but a first record - its vocal hooks are inescapable, its lush production futuristic and sophisticated but also as pristine as anything on pop radio.

The record’s 11 tracks trace a unique aesthetic universe that is carefully crafted and fully realised - deftly walking the lines between trap-rap exhilaration and otherworldly rapture, pleasure-centre pop and diaristic emotion, childlike dread and total selfpossession. Purity Ring’s is a universe that invites exploration and demands revisiting.

Corin and Megan grew up in and around Edmonton, Alberta where they were an integral part of that city’s small, tight-knit all-ages DIY music community. They toured extensively together in the band Gobble Gobble (now Born Gold), with Corin on drums and Megan singing. In the midst of a six-month-long tour, Corin’s love of R&B and hip hop grew, and he began experimenting with beat-making in Ableton Live. He asked Megan to lay down vocals on a song called ‘Ungirthed’, and Purity Ring was born. The song made its way online in January of 2011 to immediate international acclaim, and thus the two were suddenly faced with the daunting task of turning a studio project into a real band. To meet the challenge, Megan and Corin spent nearly six months conceiving a live show that would do justice to the unique music they were recording.

Every element of Purity Ring’s live presence has been carefully considered, from the clothes they wear (all designed and handmade by expert stitcher Megan) to the tactile, hybrid musical instrument / lighting machine that Corin built himself. The resulting spectacle can’t be overstated; infectious vocal leads chopped and screwed improvisationally, synth leads and lighting triggered live with a drummer’s precision.

Purity Ring’s performance is a lived synaesthesia that transcends the pitfalls often associated with live electronic-based music. Of course, perhaps the most exciting thing about Purity Ring is the overriding sense that these live performance innovations and their exceptional debut Shrines are merely the beginning of a collaboration whose remarkable chemistry is sure to bear much more to come - future pop, in every sense of the phrase.

STAFF COMMENTS

Ryan says: I'm sure we've all been waiting eagerly for this one, witness the epic shimmering beauty that only Purity Ring can pull off. More of that 90's Rnb tinged synthwave you've heard so much about, similar to 'OoOOo'.