Island Of Love – the London trio making their name as the first UK signing to Jack White’s Third Man Records – announced their follow up to last year’s Songs Of Love EP with news of their much-anticipated eponymous debut album, which drops on 12th May.
Island of Love (Cole Flynn-Quirke)
They’ve also shared the first taster of their self-titled record with double A-side single Grow / Blues 2000. Grow is a thrilling, melodic slice of indie-rock pulled from their earliest demos – self-released as the now long-sold out Promo Tape cassette – into the here and now where as Blues 2000 is a gain-driven instrumental showcasing their duelling guitars and already an ear-splitting staple from the group’s live show. As well as flowing into each other on the album, it’s a live favourite of the band to play the two tracks back to back, so it makes complete sense these two would merge perfectly for the lead double A-side single.
Guitarist and vocalist Karim Newble says of their new single: “Grow was originally written by me and Linus (guitars & vocals) at my mum’s house. It was probably the first song we ever wrote together, and maybe the most positive song on the Promo Tape? I guess a lot of the lyrics were written with the intention of making each other laugh. The choruses preach typical self-help mantras, and all the verses are filled with nonsense about getting high and listening to Johnny Cash. We fleshed it out fully as a band in 2021 and played it at almost every show we’ve ever done, it has been a band favourite for a while.
Blues 2000 was formed out of an old riff that we could never turn into a real song, Linus started shredding over it and we moulded it into some ridiculous jam – we’d always play it immediately after Grow ’cause they’re in the same tuning and just bridge it with the Eastenders drum fill. The scream in the middle is done by our friend Joey Drake who fronts a crazy hardcore band called Splitknuckle, we had him say the lyrics to b by Natasha Bedingfield cause it kind of matched up.”
Check out the Cole Flynn-Quirke-directed video for Grow / Blues 2000 below:
Karim, Linus and Dan met on the London DIY hardcore punk scene and their DIY outlook continues to fiercely inform all they do – Karim does all of the band’s artwork and posters, they print their own merch, book their own tours and with Grow / Blues 2000 they take centre stage in their own video, directed by Cole Flynn-Quirke.
“The video itself spawned from an idea I’ve had for a while to visit Loch Lomond with the guys,” Karim continues. “Our friend Alfie drove us to Devil’s Pulpit which is a short drive from the loch with another friend Cole to shoot some cult looking stuff. We shot a lot of the footage in the space of two days and it gradually turned into a story of how we befriended a skeleton and initiated him into our cult. Cole shot the live footage at Fuzzbrain downstairs with the skeleton tied onto our friend Dylan so it looked like he was drumming and all the car footage was shot with our friend Theo’s help, who we asked to run by the windows with plants so it looked like we were driving… it didn’t.”
Island Of Love will also be touring in the EU / UK this Spring:
APRIL
13th – VOL, Barcelona, ES
14th – Le Ravelin, Toulouse, FR
15th – Chinastraat, Ghent, BE
18th – Vera, Groningen, NL
19th – Cinetol, Amsterdam, NL
20th – Autobahn, Berlin, DE
21st – Ada, Warsaw, PL
25th – Cafe XXE, Fribourg, CH
27th – L’Intermediaire, Marseille, FR
29th – Gold Sounds Festival, Leeds, UK
MAY
13th – Rough Trade East, London, UK
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