NEW MUSIC & ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT: Stealing Sheep ‘Big Wows’

27/11/2018

The long awaited return from Stealing Sheep is over, as next spring they release their third record ‘Big Wows.’

FADER Magazine are premiering the brand new single ‘Joking Me’:

“Joking Me” is the first song to be taken from the band’s forthcoming album Big Wows, due on April 19 on Heavenly Recordings. The album is the follow-up to the British trio’s 2015 record Not Real.

Speaking to The FADER via email, Stealing Sheep said: “Both the song and the video speak a lot about todays modern culture and how things seem throw away: love, communication, revealing the disappointments and let downs but also the ephemeral of the delete, trash, emoji digital world. The way you can put up a front on social media, cultivate an imagined life, your best life.

“We teamed up with 8bit video artist Pastel Castle (Emily Garner) from Leeds, who created Stealing Sheep avatars, we became pixelated superheroes in an over saturated and glitchy platform. It sets the scene for a full series of karaoke videos to be released alongside the album exploring Stealing Sheep in a digital dimension, shifting identities amidst changing cultural moods and millennial paraphernalia. The “Do you think about me” HTML malfunction noting the obsessive nature of social media. It’s a crazy time and it’s challenging navigating through it.”

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Big Wows is heavier, harder and weirder than Stealing Sheep’s previous work. Bold neon pop songs with rave percussion, steelpans, dreamy segues and breathy experiments. The *fsszzt* sound of lemonade opens the album with a hyper-real sense of optimism that progressively reveals the cracks of dystopian irony amidst sugar–coated pop; held together by Emily Lansley’s bass guitar, Luciana Mercer’s drum kit, Rebecca Hawley’s synths, and the trio’s swooning steely vocal harmonies.

Stealing Sheep describe Big Wows as “a slow rush”; taking shape over a period of nearly three years spent working out exactly what they wanted it to be and creating an album that levitated their identities as individuals as well as merging them into one unit “We’re each finding our own creative intuition,” says Bex “…and then we come together…and we back each other up” adds Lucy.

Just as the title suggests, Big Wows is both cynical and optimistic: dreaminess and pop dance rhythms are cut with eye rolling vocal styles inflected by heartfelt lyrical messages “We hit upon this conversational-style between the vocals and have alternating lead melodies. There’s a sarcastic tone to some of the music but there is always a strong willfulness to incorporate honest integrity, which is hard to do but refreshing when it finally comes out.”