Ecstatic Arrow News Today

On Virginia Wings fourth full-length, the albums themes of isolation, dealing with trauma, and mental wellbeing reflect a collective despair that we are all feeling after a year without spontaneous human interactions. Right now, it feels like all our lives are private – the self that we show to others being just a preselected snapshot mediated through feeds and computer screens.    Having made Ecstatic Arrow in alpine Switzerlands picturesque setting in 2018, the Manchester tr...

7.5/10 It’s a crazy world; as we’ve become more isolated, social media has become a forum for people to share every detail, opinion and non-event that happens to them, a state in which you can often feel more voyeur than follower. Virginia Wing’s last album, Ecstatic Arrow, was recorded with the Swiss Alps as a backdrop. This time however, the group – now a trio following the addition of Christopher Duffin – took the only available course of action left to them by recording, ‘at...

A Private Life Is A Happy Life? Virginia Wing Interviewed Fourth album private LIFE was their easiest to make. It was everything going on around it that was the problem. It’s not always easy to trust in your own process, but four albums in Virginia Wing feel like they’re in their groove. “It didn’t feel as daunting doing it as maybe our others had done” says the group’s vocalist, lyricist and co-arranger Merida Richards of their new albums e...

Most of punk’s sonic hallmarks calcified into cliche long ago, but if there’s one trope still able to induce the shock of the old, it’s the dissonant, direct, stubbornly wonky female vocals that animate the work of the Slits, the Raincoats and X-Ray Spex. On Manchester trio Virginia Wing’s fourth album, frontwoman Alice Merida Richards evokes their thrillingly relatable voices with her own – a jerky, unmediated sprechgesang that combines vacant...

Expanding from a duo to a trio, complete with saxophone, the Manchester group embraces newfound production gloss without sacrificing its indie-pop roots.

Cathartic, abstract and certainly treading off the beaten path.

It isn’t immediately obvious that  private LIFE, Virginia Wing’s fourth album, is their most engaging album to date. Anyone might think it’s ‘just’  Ecstatic Arrow Mk. 2 – and neither artist nor listener would be to blame, given how the Manchester group’s 2018 release represents such a strident leap forward that it would be inadvisable to do anything too off-piste for the follow-up. The two LPs are linked by a similar strain of ‘fourth world’ production, covertly masking wh...

Patrick Clarke , January 29th, 2021 12:00 The new year brings a continuation of old miseries, but a resurgence of extraordinarily good music. Heres our guide to the best albums and tracks of a particularly strong month Im not sure why, but in a year so far as disastrous as the last, in which musicians fortunes continue to plummet to the point that total collapse looms as a real possibility, the art theyve been releasing sounds stronger than ever. From Sleaford Mods blistering career-best new a...