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PILLOW QUEENS

Pillow Queens

Name Your Sorrow

    After forming in 2016, Pillow Queens released a series of singles, honing their craft and working towards their first album, In Waiting (2020). Along the way there has been acclaim from UK and American press, many sold-out gigs and an appearance on James Corden's Late Late Show. After signing with Canada’s Royal Mountain Records, they released a follow-up album, Leave the Light On in 2022, touring the UK, US and Europe extensively, including shows at Austin’s SXSW and supporting Phoebe Bridgers in Glasgow.

    Three albums in three years indicates a serious work ethic, for their new album Name Your Sorrow they stuck to a strict schedule. They showed up every day from 9-5, in a windowless Dublin room to just play, swap instruments and experiment. From there, they decamped to a rural retreat in County Clare along the Atlantic coastline of Ireland, to immerse themselves further. “ The palpable shift in sound and tone is possibly the result of working with a new producer, Collin Pastore from Nashville, who has produced boygenius, Lucy Dacus and Illuminati Hotties. The band holed up for three weeks at Analogue Catalogue studio in Newry, and quickly noticed that the change of scene and personnel impacted on the record.

    The result of combining new experimentation, heartfelt lyrics and a sound that pinballs from quiet and loud offers a kind of catharsis. Of picking through the shrapnel to find slivers of hope. Previously, the band have road-tested new tracks live, playing them to an audience and reworking them based on the crowd’s reaction. They haven’t done that this time, because the songs already feel fully formed. The band also had to unlearn the process of questioning whether a song sounded like “a Pillow Queens song”. There are definite links to the last two albums, but Name Your Sorrow feels like a triumphant step in another direction.


    TRACK LISTING

    Side 1
    1. February 8th
    2. Suffer
    3. Like A Lesson
    4. Blew Up The World
    5. Friend Of Mine
    6. The Bar's Closed
    Side 2
    1. So Kind
    2. Heavy Pour
    3. One Night
    4. Love II
    5. Notes On Worth

    Pillow Queens

    Leave The Light On

      Leave the Light On is an exploration of the uncertainty of emotions as they are in process, and an intuitive outpouring of ideas as they form. It’s about being intimately honest with yourself, and as a band. It’s about trusting that this state of vulnerability can be held as it emerges, by you, by us.

      What do queer dream blues sound like? More importantly, what do they feel like? Leaving home at night, driving through the black back roads until the tungsten light starts to glow. “Uaigneas an chaldaigh”, the Irish sense of loneliness experienced on the shore. The confusion and discombobulation of waking and feeling unfamiliar.

      The liminal space between dreaming and being conscious. The unmooring that happens when a sense of self is being explored and sometimes slipping away.

      But gravitating towards the unknown and the ambiguous can often yield the kinds of sounds and feelings that provide creative certainty, where the art is coming to you, as much as you going to it. Leave the Light On fills vast new sonic plains for Pillow Queens. It’s an album that encourages duality; to be soft and hard, delicate, and muscular, intimate and anthemic, alone and together. Collaborating on lyrics, a shared emotional experience fills these songs of hope and home, insecurity and estrangement, songs that track time passing and a sense of reflection grows deeper every day.

      When real movement is stillness, when to be stationary feels transitionary, and when the most vital journey in life is to go within, then it’s time to leave the light on, and open up.

      TRACK LISTING

      Be By Your Side
      The Wedding Band
      Hearts & Minds
      House That Sailed Away
      Delivered
      Well Kept Wife
      No Good Woman
      Historian
      My Body Moves
      Try Try Try

      Events currently taking place throughout the world only serve to stoke a fire under the likes of Pillow Queens, who find themselves continually inspired by a Dublin that is no stranger to fighting social injustice. Street artists, fashion designers, musicians, film makers and more comprise a scene which routinely champions queerness and marginalized groups, and engages with and activates young people in response to the likes of the city’s ongoing housing and mental health crises. Pillow Queens’ songs of togetherness and unity ring out louder than ever before.

      In their short lifespan as a band they've released two demo EPs, performed on a successful string of UK & Irish dates & festival appearances, had playlisting from BBC 6 Music, and found themselves opening for the likes of American Football and Pussy Riot, as well as stadium performances opening for IDLES and Future Islands.

      With all this under their belt, the band began working with Mercury Prize nominated producer Tommy McLaughlin for their single 'Gay Girls' – which received a nomination for the RTE Choice Music Prize song of the year, as well as International pickup from NPR’s World Cafe and KEXP. The song also found its way into the heart of actor Cillian Murphy and his BBC6 mixtape show.

      2019 saw Pillow Queens venture into mainland Europe, as they lit up the Eurosonic festival and completed a string of tour dates opening for Soak. The tour was a messy and joyous affair captured beautifully in the DIY video for the bands summer single 'HowDoILook'.

      In Waiting is Pillow Queens’ debut album, the result of four years of brotherly love in a sisterly unit from Ireland’s most urgent, yearning, rock band. Crafted from our lives, and honed in a studio in rural Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, this is a record by queens in waiting and kings in the making. It’s an album about love; self-love, queer love, the anxiety-inducing fault lines of romantic love, and the love for a city and a country that simultaneously has your back and is on your back.


      TRACK LISTING

      1) Holy Show
      2) Child Of Prague
      3) Handsome Wife
      4) How Do I Look
      5) Liffey
      6) A Dog’s Life
      7) Gay Girls
      8) Harvey
      9) Brothers
      10) Donaghmede


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