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Not wanting to put any pressure on anything or anyone but our recent encounters wit Gazelle Twin, especially that midsummer performance have been the most rewarding of recent times. The promise of a new Gazelle Twin is something rather exciting, and here we are in the sunshine of a first Monday morning of September and (another) black dog has come knocking. This first taste of her new album is extremely dark, extremely inviting, intriguing, promising, tantalising, a dark dark carrot dangled, a deep deep breath, and we need the rest…
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The video for ‘Black Dog’, directed by John Minton, is jsut up there. Talking about Minton’s work, Bernholz said, “I find the manifestations of AI very ghostly in nature, so it worked brilliantly for this film, incorporating the album cover illustration by Craig Humpston, interior walkthroughs and visual feedback. John’s film perfectly evokes the inky, looming and restless nature of childhood fear that inspired the song.” Minton goes on to say: “The track required the overriding atmosphere to be murky, dark, and ominous and then burst into life. The structure of the song guided the way whilst I fused Analogue and AI processing to create an unnerving dreamscape.”
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Black Dog tells a story that unfurls like a film. It addresses how our childhoods shaped our adulthoods: how any sense of trauma and grief is burnished onto a person’s memories forever, however much we try and escape it. Black Dog suggests how these feelings return in particular intensity when a person becomes a parent, as they watch themselves pass things on that they wish they hadn’t, wish they wouldn’t.
In some ways, Bernholz is purging herself on this album. Unlike her masked characters for previous releases, her face is recognisable and, she explains, she is “not as removed this time” from her persona. She is imagining herself as a medium for the voices inside herself, rather than looking out to displace them with other ideas. She emerges huge and godly as she does so, her voice moving from delicate tenderness to doom-driven power.
This is an album where old stories have to be pillaged, digested, and regurgitated to write new ones, where we have to question ourselves utterly. Black Dog looks back and looks in and looks back and looks in. We enter as we listen. We turn ourselves inside-out altogether.
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BLACK DOG TRACKLISTING
I Disappear
Sweet Dream
Fear Keeps Us Alive
Two Worlds
The Long Room
Unstoppable Force
This House
Author Of You
Walk Through Walls
A Door Opens
GAZELLE TWIN – 2023 TOUR
10 November – London, Bush Hall
16 November – Newcastle, Sage 2
24 November – Brighton, ACCA
Tickets are on sale now
And the fact that YouTube, in that automatic seemingly random way it does things, chooses to play us some rather relaxing ambient warmth after the taste of her black dog seems somehow fitting as the late Summersunshine heats everything up on this Monday morning…
THE ORGAN 
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