New Album ‘These Frightening Machines’ – VARIOUS FORMATS

Katherine Priddy has announced the release of her third album, These Frightening Machines on March 6 via Cooking Vinyl. The new record follows Priddy’s highly acclaimed debut The Eternal Rocks Beneath and sophomore LP The Pendulum Swing which firmly established her as one of the most exciting artists on the contemporary British music scene.

First single “Matches”, a powerful feminist anthem, is out now.

Priddy said of the track: “This song is inspired by a rabbit hole I went down about the language we use when referencing the witch hunts and the witch trials, which still tends to focus on the burning of ‘witches’. Really, it wasn’t witches they were hunting down and accusing and killing, it was women (in the majority of cases), killed for all sorts of reasons and false accusations.”

In celebration of the new album release, Priddy will take to the road in April and May next year for a lengthy UK headline tour.

Speaking about These Frightening Machines, Priddy shared: “If the first album was for building a foundation, and the second album was about reinforcing what I’d already begun, the third album felt to me like a chance to be bolder, push out and try something new.”

Produced by Rob Ellis (P J Harvey, Anna Calvi, Marianne Faithfull, Bat for Lashes) and recorded at The Glaucus House, Middle Farm Studios in rural Devon, These Frightening Machines was written over the course of a year as Priddy made the transition from her 20s to her 30s. She consciously kept an open mind during the making of the album, focussed purely on being creative, and determined to let the songs find their own form.

“At its core,” added Priddy, “I think These Frightening Machines explores the ever shifting relationship I have with my sense of self as a woman, my body and my place in the world as a 30 year old artist – but I’d like to think that whilst the songs are born from personal experience, the feelings expressed are widely relatable.”

The most sonically varied of her career, the songs on Priddy’s new album span a full spectrum of emotions from anger and despair to hope, longing and lust, from reclaiming the voices of women silenced by history, to expressing solidarity and love, to confronting illness, disconnection, the vulnerability and importance of relationships, and the general ache of growing older and not always wiser. They explore what it means to keep going when things fall apart, to hold onto connections in a world that sometimes divides, and to figure out where we fit into the machines and systems we find ourselves a part of.

“I wanted to end this album on a question mark,” said Priddy “as whilst I’d have hoped to have it all figured out by the third album and my third decade, I’ve come to accept that perhaps part of being human is being a perpetual work in progress. Could this collection of songs be enough? If it strikes a match and casts a little light for anyone who has ever felt their body falter, their love waver, or time slip through their fingers, then that’s enough for me.”

Notable guests on These Frightening Machines include American singer/songwriter Torres who duets on “Madeleine”, and Richard Walters who duets on “I’m Always Willing”. Revered, alt folk multi-instrumentalist Ben Christophers (Natasha Khan, Guy Garvey and many more) features on most of the album’s tracks. 

Tracklisting:
1. Matches
2. Frightening Machines
3. Sirius
4. Hurricane
5. Madeleine
6. Atlas
7. A Matter of Time
8. Table Four
9. I’m Always Willing
10. Could This Be Enough?