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BEAR'S DEN

Bear's Den

First Loves / White Magnolias

    An incredibly prolific 2022 saw Bear's Den release their highly-praised fourth studio album 'Blue Hours' in May, which peaked in the UK Album Charts at No 6, and their original soundtrack for the Apple TV+ series Trying, on which they collaborated with the likes of Maisie Peters and Jade Bird.

    2023 sees folk-pop duo Bear's Den return once again to release a pair of new EPs, First Loves and White Magnolias.

    Formed in London 2012, Bear's Den have amassed a dedicated and international fan base with their anthemic songs. With 4 studio albums under their belt, as well as a collaborative project with composer Paul Frith, they have been a regular fixture in the charts of UK and Europe since their inception. Their debut album 'Islands' also garnered a nomination for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.

    Having toured around the world playing theatres, arenas and festivals (including Reading and Leeds, Glastonbury Festival's Other Stage, Pukkelpop, Lowlands and Bonnaroo), in 2019, following the release of their third album 'So That You Might Hear Me' they returned to their origins for a tour of tiny 'Highlands and Islands' venues across Scotland and a supporting documentary. No stranger to music documentary making, the band also featured heavily in the award-winning documentary Austin To Boston alongside Ben Howard, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Staves.

    TRACK LISTING

    Evelyn 
    Helen Of Hammersmith Bridge 
    Summer & Smoke 
    Teach Me, Ava
    White Magnolias 
    Loneliness 
    Honest Mistake 
    Imitation

    Blue Hours sees the much-loved folk-rock duo – made up of Andrew Davie and Kevin Jones – once again team up with producer Ian Grimble on what is one of their most personal records to date.

    Speaking about the new album, Davie says: “Blue Hours is a kind of imaginary space you get into at night, a place where you process difficult things or where you try to figure everything out.”

    Themes on the album include both self-reflection and mental health after both struggled with the latter in recent years. “It’s the main over-arching theme with this record,” Davie explains. The group, who have worked with mental health charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) previously added: “It probably speaks to our struggles and hopefully many other people’s too. Men are not very good at talking. We’re not really taught how to – men have no idea how to talk about this stuff, certainly to each other.”

    The pair describe the conceptual blue hours headspace that gives the new album its title as being “somewhere between a hotel, a mental health hospital, a bar that stays open later than anywhere else, a paradise, a dream, a nightmare and an endless sea of corridors and staircases leading you to rooms that represent memories – good, bad, happy or difficult.”

    Despite the album’s challenging themes, it’s an album drenched in hope too. “We wanted this to be a celebration of music,” Jones continues. “I think that informed some of the bolder decision making on this record. At a time when music was so distant, it felt important to make an album that sounded hopeful, celebratory, ambitious and beautiful in spite of the heavy subject matter in some of the songs.” Jones adds: “It was almost like we needed to shout louder than before because we felt that there were more barriers between the audience and us. We needed something to transcend that.”


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: This is another beautiful outing from Bear's Den, both orchestral and tender in equal measure. These are grand, bold pieces with a brittle and fragile core, both cathartic and touching.

    TRACK LISTING

    Side A
    New Ways
    Blue Hours
    Frightened Whispers
    Gratitude
    Shadows
    Side B
    All That You Are
    Spiders
    Selective Memories
    On Your Side
    All The Wrong Places


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