Allow yourself to be enchanted by the mystical pop sounds of New Zealand sister duo Purple Pilgrims. Set to deliver the delicious goods on February 7th…
The music of Purple Pilgrims shimmers with veiled, kaleidoscopic textures, arriving at a sound that is both spacious and sensual, swooning and spellbound. There’s a distinct Lynchian tone to their mesmerising music. A unique nexus of paradise and isolation, beauty and blankness, ritual and the right now.
In a word: essential.
“An exercise in crystal-toned psychedelic dream-pop excellence…a masterful full-length debut” – The 405
Psychic sisterhood and wistful wanderlust are the twin energies feeding lush ceremonial dream-pop duo Purple Pilgrims – AKA multi-instrumentalist, home producers Valentine and Clementine Nixon. Raised itinerantly in Hong Kong and on New Zealand’s South Island, with deep backgrounds in folk music (their great-grandfather Davie Stewart was recorded by Alan Lomax), the sisters adapted by devising their own telepathic inner worlds. After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 leveled their home they migrated to the North Island, crashing with friends and sleeping in cars, eventually returning to China, where they began performing crouched sets of gauzy, angelic noise.
Subsequent tours of Europe and America alongside Yek Koo, Gary War and Ariel Pink helped hone their sprawling, choral haze into leaner, more mantric forms. To record their first full-length LP Eternal Delight, the Pilgrims sequestered themselves in Tapu, on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula of NZ, in a shed surrounded by native palms and birds. The isolation, stars, and river nightswimming evidently soaked into the music – all 10 tracks radiate spectral feeling and wide-eyed sensuality. In 2018 Purple Pilgrims collaborated with legendary Antipodean guitarist Roy Montgomery (The Pin Group) on his album Suffuse, alongside some of the era’s most compelling women singers (Grouper, Circuit des Yeux, Julianna Barwick), the sisters lending their voices and lyricism to his enveloping sound.
“…dark, spaceous, fantastical music rooted in mysticism and wonder, weaving ethereal tales of ancient, mythological grandeur” – The Line of Best Fit
“The combination of sleek instrumentation and ancient-sounding melodies is half sci-fi, half fairytale and completely fascinating…” – All Music
“Welcome to the cult of Purple Pilgrims. It’s as surreal as you might expect” – Vice
