Yesterday South African band Beatenberg announced The Great Fire Of Beatenberg, their first album in five years. Produced by Ross Dorkin and Matthew Field from the band and mixed by Nathan Boddy (Mura Masa, PinkPantheress, Gabriels), it’s the London-based band’s most diverse and genre agnostic offering yet, melding far-flung rhythms and acoustic and electronic instrumentation in a melting pot of styles.
It will be released on 5 April 2024 via Leafy Outlook with their biggest headline show in the UK to date at Koko on 18 April 2024.
The announcement follows the release of their latest South African radio single, “Don’t Call Her Over To You” in September 2023 – a playful take on the record-breaking band’s global approach to pop music which they have been busy exporting since 2022 after a four year hiatus.
Beatenberg have been enjoying success for the best part of a decade
After the group’s debut album was released in 2014, they broke radio chart records, won numerous awards in their native South Africa which led to worldwide touring with performances on Later with Jools Holland and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. This exposure led to signing a deal with Island Records UK with whom they released their second album, 2018s 12 Views of Beatenberg.
The Great Fire Of Beatenberg is the group’s first offering since ‘On the way to Beatenberg‘, a post-pandemic EP that reconnected the band musically for the first time since they took a hiatus in 2018.
Lead singer Matthew Field said at the time: “We hadn’t hung out together outside of the band for such a long time. It was almost like in order to make music together again, we had to become friends again.”
Now living in between London and Berlin, their reformation in 2022 was a success. Pitchfork wrote they were sounding “wiser, softer, and as virtuosic as ever.” They sold out their first headline tour of Europe and the US, culminating in a performance at SXSW in March 2023.
On their next album, their journey to rekindle their explosive mutual chemistry has come to fruition. The band is made up of Matthew Field (vocals and guitar), Robin Brink (drums), and Ross Dorkin (bass). Beatenberg’s third album, The Great Fire Of Beatenberg comes out April 5, 2024 via Leafy Outlook.
Watch this space for updates in the Music News category on SA Music Zone.
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