Pulse Music Magazine Jealous of the Birds – the acclaimed musical moniker of Northern Ireland-based singer-songwriter Naomi Hamilton – has announced her new album, Hinterland, due via Canvasback/Atlantic on Friday, May 19.
“Hinterland’ is an old Germanic word dating back to the 19th Century that literally translates to ‘behind land,’” says Hamilton. “It conjures up images of remote tundras and desolate places beyond the boundaries of what is known and explored. The past two or three years of pandemic and unrest have occupied a very liminal space for me personally, but also for the industry I work in, and more significantly for our collective humanity and planet. We are grappling with unknowns and trying to attribute meaning and action as best we can.“
“This record is one person weighing up the ways in which we’re isolated from one another, with the ways we are deeply connected in perilous times. How we hold the capacity not only to be repelled by the chaos of civilization towards the peace of a hinterland, but also to be drawn out of the remoteness of our mental landscapes toward a renewed sense of belonging.”
Produced, engineered and mixed by Declan Legge, comes the singer-songwriter’s latest single, “Morse Code.” “We often find ourselves navigating what exactly our place is in the world,” says Hamilton, “especially in our twenties and thirties. Suddenly things get serious and there’s a simmering pressure to figure things out. ‘Morse Code’ taps into that and acts as a gentle encouragement that the only thing that really matters is the fact you’re alive, so try not to overthink it and just live as best you can.”
A true polymath – poet and painter, songwriter and musician – Hamilton spent lockdown working on an array of projects, including the publication of Heat of the Sun, a chapbook of forty poems and photographic work captured on a manual Canon 35mm camera. New music soon emerged, inspired in part by the untamed figure of Walt Whitman, American sensualist, vagabond and laureate of the wild spaces. Armed with potent, patient new songs like “Beginner’s Luck” and “Borderwalker,” Jealous of the Birds set to record Hinterland at studios in Northern Ireland including Newry’s Big Space Studios and Analogue Catalogue Vintage Recording Studio.
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