PRAISES returns with a full band and their second studio album In This Year: Hierophant. Through instinct, talent and of course, blind luck, Praises harnessed their sound through the course of the pandemic, leaning into the creative spirit and a recording process reminiscent of a Bad Seeds project, key players wrote their parts from only a demo track and a feeling. The result pushes beyond their industrial synth-based offerings, incorporating the intensity of their highly regarded live performances with an intimate, collaborative and distanced songwriting process.

As with their highly acclaimed debut album, In This Year: Ten Of Swords, Jesse Crowe works with career-long collaborator Josh Korody (Beliefs, Breeze, Candle Studio) on the mix and with Heather Kirby mastering (Dreamlands). Every new year Crowe draws a tarot card to represent what is to come, shaping the character of the coming album and its title. On In This Year: Hierophant, Praises delves deeper into a world of hypnotic vocals, textured synths and arrangements to transcendent effect. This album expands Praises’ sonic palette stylistically and lyrically, exploring themes of human reckoning and hope. Above all, this is clearly an album made by a band who love working together. “This record dances like a story book, flirting with vignettes of hidden gender, through the birth of a child, a poisonous new world, matriarchal death, and transcendent love. A graduation beyond a solo project.” – Crowe

Praises first emerged at a time when Beliefs co-front, Jesse Crowe, struggled to find an outlet to release their inner conversations into a public forum. Into a place where their creative outlet has evolved and spanned over a course of four EPs and two albums. Dark and theatrical, Crowe’s influences move through the hum of Rachel Goswell’s shoegazing, the drive of Patti Smith’s poetic delivery, blending the art-gloom of Beth Gibbons’ sultry jazz with Annie Lennox’ avant-gardism found on a “Night Full of Tension” and “Sweet Surprise.” A unique mixing which “makes Praises’ dark nights of the soul feel hypnotic, carving out territory between Bat for Lashes and Nick Cave’s Skeleton Key.” (Exclaim! Magazine)

The songs on this new record grew both slowly and reflective. “March” is a call to action and a sister song to “A World on Fire” from EP4. The song explores the gaslighting of colonial extraction industries and the culpability of those who stay silent, beginning with a motorik beat and crafting the tension with a full band in tow. “Life is Just a Picture” is a song that breathes with both the sorrow and joy of a lifetime of memories, it was written in dedication to the intermingling stories of Grandma Upton and Granny Crowe. “In the years following the Me Too movement, it can feel as though every safe feeling male mentor will be exposed as an abuser” reflects Crowe, “the song “Our Father” is a letter to Nick Cave, and is meant to playfully invoke his tone as a means to warn him against ever being a pig.”

In This Year: Hierophant is released June 17th 2022 via Hand Drawn Dracula.