Child Of The Parish have taken a step towards the 6th September 2024 release of their eagerly anticipated debut album Sweet Surrender by unleashing its first single Always The Fool. It follows the early acclaim and tastemaker attention that greeted their first two EPs, Make It Better and Quiet Life with highlights including a playlist and repeated support from Jack Saunders at Radio 1 plus further airplay from 6 Music and BBC Introducing.
Child Of The Parish
Always The Fool sees the sonic adventurers – brothers Ben and Tom Vella – deliver a moment of blissful summer euphoria, with a heady cocktail of shimmering indie-electronic pop, hazy psychedelia and ‘80s-tinged nostalgia, viewed through a disco mirrorball prism. It’s a track that takes the core traits of their sound and elevates them to stratospheric new highs, putting Child Of The Parish in prime position to fulfil their undoubted potential as international festival favourites.
Ben Vella says: “I think it’s one of those tunes where we had a super simple approach to the arrangement. A lot of our songs tend to meander and have these signature time shifts. There’s definitely a lot of Daft Punk in the synths, and I love the multiple layers of vocals. Disco will never die!”
Ben and Tom approached the making of Sweet Surrender with the idea of making a mixtape, but that evolved into a bigger project as they discovered they were happiest when they were free to let their own creativity flourish. Where there have been times when they focused on the idea of writing a hit, they found that following their instincts was far more productive. They lent into the elation of experimenting with different styles, creating a freedom which gives their debut LP the polish and cohesiveness of an album with the playfulness and curiosity of a mixtape.
Check out Always The Fool below:
The album takes its cues from classic house and dance, melding glitchy, electronic sounds with more organic elements of indie, disco and funk. It’s a record in which sadness and euphoria are persistently on a knife-edge, the darkness of its lyrics adorned in glittery, upbeat sounds, often teetering between otherworldly harmonies and glimmering production. The album was produced independently by Child Of The Parish, with mixing and engineering from Shuta Shinoda (Hot Chip, Spiritualised, Daughter), who, it turned out, runs a studio a stone’s throw from Ben’s home.
Ben and Tom had always grown up around music, their grandfather enjoying a long career as a professional orchestra musician. Their prior projects achieved some attention, with Tom establishing himself as a DJ as well as releasing music via Black Butter, while Ben’s myriad experiences spanned everything from working with Kylie Minogue to playing an oud in a documentary about the war in Afghanistan.
Yet somehow the brothers hadn’t ever pursued a substantial project together. That all changed when they attended Glastonbury Festival together and realised that a high energy, genre-blurring mix of their most kaleidoscopic influences – Daft Punk, Simian Mobile Disco, The Chemical Brothers, Tame Impala, M83 and Beck – would fire up dancefloors everywhere.
Child Of The Parish soon took off, with other early accomplishments including landing a Radio 1 Hottest Record with their remix for Mystery Jets, having their own track, Forever’s Not Enough, remixed by The Magician (Years & Years, Clean Bandit), headlining The Lexington for BBC Introducing, and having their debut track included on the soundtrack to the FIFA game franchise.
The group followed their second EP by touring as guests to Tayo Sound. But tragedy struck with the loss of their friend and collaborator Rich Brown, leading the duo to question whether they could even continue the project. Eventually they came to the realisation that he would really want them to continue, leading them to write a huge body of new songs away from the public spotlight. Now they’re back with Always The Fool – the first taste of Sweet Surrender.
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