PREMIERE: The Hundredth Anniversary – “Knife”
Bleak indie-pop three-piece The Hundredth Anniversary are back with new single “Knife”, a super-dreamy cut taken from the Brighton band’s long-awaited debut LP, Sea State Pictures, released earlier this month on Faking Jazz Records.
A shade over half an hour, it’s a winsome album that’s as twee as it chilly, one fond of wispy intros and emotive cinematics that slow-burn to conjure images of windswept lovers breaking up in the rain. Its patient tracks, nine of the infamous fifty shades of grey, strain to make the most of barely-there dynamics, each gently developing via echoing acoustics into delicate-yet-insistent slowcore.
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The counterpoint to Sea State Pictures’ temporally disorientating and lengthy lead single “After I Was Thrown In The River”, “Knife” is the album’s shortest statement, its sleepy bounce abetted by Eleanor Rudge’s soothing, swooning vocal – crystalline dream-pop guitar slicing through an cold evening mist like a dagger. Its video, directed by talented fellow Brightonian musician/artist Eva Bowan and which you can watch below, is outdoorsy to the extreme, colour saturation giving it an otherworldly feel perfectly suited to the band’s melodically chiming aesthetic. Grab a listen now.
~Sea State Pictures is out now on Faking Jazz Records.~