February 22, 2023

Tiny Ruins – Dorothy Bay: New Song Of The Day

Tiny Ruins has just released new song Dorothy Bay and there’s a new album on the way. Ceremony is due out on April 28th!

Here’s the blurb with more:

Tiny Ruins announce their fourth album, Ceremony, out April 28th via Ba Da Bing Records, Marathon Artists and Milk! Records, and share a new single, ‘Dorothy Bay.’ The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls – a finalist for the Taite Music Prize.

If first single ‘The Crab / Waterbaby‘ was a shimmering meditation on being stuck, ‘Dorothy Bay‘ is a stomping propulsion forward – the songwriter is pulled along the pavement by two wayward dogs, yoinking the listener along into a swirling vortex of sound. Perhaps the most rock ‘n’ roll moment for Tiny Ruins yet, the track is grounded in a weighty rhythm section – almost as if Alex Freer and Cass Basil have been finally unleashed. The duelling acoustic and electric guitars of Hollie Fullbrook and Tom Healy circle overhead before the chorus opens up wide to a view of the harbour itself and a realisation that, ‘you carry on – the tide is a radar – breathing on, like it or not.’ A song with a strong pull & loudly beating heart, ‘Dorothy Bay’ continues the saga taking place on the coves of Little Muddy Creek, with more chapters to follow in the much anticipated new album Ceremony due out on April 28th.

Directed by Alexander Gandar, the accompanying video is an epic, psychedelic survey of Āwhitu. It took the small crew and band two days of filming to capture the landscape in all its glory – the results are a buzzy, color-shifting, dreamlike visual confection.

ABOUT CEREMONY

A rare blend of eloquent lyrical craft and explorative musicianship, the songs of Tiny Ruins are etched into the memories of crowds and critics worldwide. Traversing influences that cross genre and era, the artistry of Hollie Fullbrook and her band spans delicate folk, lustrous dream pop and ebullient psychedelia. Building on the sparse arrangements and a novelist’s eye for detail cultivated over the past several years, the group’s greatly anticipated fourth album is out on Ba Da Bing Records, Marathon Artists and Courtney Barnett’s label Milk! Records. If Olympic Girls was an album suffused with existential emptiness, portraits often sketched from afar or in empty buildings, Ceremony zooms right in, unafraid of intimacy and connection. Now over a decade in, Hollie Fullbrook’s evolution as Tiny Ruins has reached an apex of power, as she’s become a deft bandleader of incredible musicians. Ceremony has many moods, ranging from intense minimalist ‘Diving & Soaring‘ that evokes a classic folk vibe through to the heavier Neil Young-inspired ‘Dorothy Bay‘, bop ‘In Light of Everything‘, and the hooky, uplifting ‘Dogs Dreaming‘. Noodly 70s electric guitars, eclectic percussion and prominent bass might make it their most listenable and accessible album to date. The songs are all of a theme – exploring the coastal shores of the Manukau Harbour and working through a psychological ‘shellscape’, while tending toward a joyful / hopeful take on the passing of time. Ceremony is the band’s highest achievement, an album about confronting confusion, loss, dislocation and ultimately realising the beauty of life’s unpredictable paths.