Following on from recent singles, Maybe You Didn’t Know and Everything Will Be Fine, Glaswegian post punks The Ninth Wave today return with new single and video Piece and Pound Coins. The track will be on the band’s new album coming in 2022. Watch and listen below.
Piece and Pound Coins was mixed by Max Heyes (Massive Attack, Doves, Lucia & The Best Boys, Primal Scream) and self-produced by the four piece band. Although upbeat and carried by a mellow piano riff, the track actually deals with topics of loss and grief as lead singer Haydn Park-Patterson explains:
I wrote this song about a friend who passed away a number of years ago. I’ve never really felt like I wanted to/could write about him for a number of reasons, but I guess the main one was because that for a long time, I wouldn’t have known what to write. Writing about death is a world away from writing about heartache/love/friendships because there’s nobody to listen to the song and wonder “is that about me?”. It’s a strange feeling, to write a song about someone that you know can’t ever hear it. The song also touches on the thought of wondering what he’d be up to now, 5 years on in his life, and how weird a thought it is that we’ve all continued on with our lives but his had a start and end point, and that’s it. No more memories to be made. The song also lets out a bit of confused anger that I felt not long after he passed, as I watched how a few people reacted to his death and the way in which they talked about it. That’s the meaning behind the line ‘death makes some people sad and some people ugly / and some people took your name for their own sake’. I like to think that he’d like the song, as he was one of the most supportive and positive-minded people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.
Video director Rianne White adds:
I feel completely in awe of this song and Haydn’s ability to frame such an immense feeling. Embraced by the catharsis of nature, the heights of grief and identity are expressed through a journey of Haydn’s internal growth accompanied by a symbolically poignant lone wolf. I like to think of Hayden and the wolf as one, both finding their way back to their truest states of being with wild untamed hearts of companionship and eternal loyalty.
The Ninth Wave released their two-part debut album Infancy in 2019 and have since toured with the likes of Editors, Pussy Riot, CHVRCHES, Franz Ferdinand, Suede, The Magic Gang, Yonaka, and The Blinders. With new material under their belt, the quartet will play a run of headline shows across the UK this autumn. Remaining tickets are available here*.
