Liverpool duo King Hannah are gearing up to release the follow-up to last year’s excellent debut album, “Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine”. While a new album hasn’t been officially announced yet, they have just shared an excellent new single, “A Well-Made Woman.” Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle are skillful builders of mood, and here craft layers of smoky atmosphere with simmering guitar lines, clattering drums and Hannah’s low-key, smouldering vocals. “A Well-Made Woman” slinks along familiar path tread by PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star, Portishead, and others — but King Hannah bring their own flair and command of dynamics. It’s a slow-burn stunner.
If you need more fire/heat metaphors, the video for “A Well-Made Woman,” directed by Whittle,
Our brand new single, “A Well-Made Woman,” is OUT NOW!! We’re SO excited for you all to hear what we’ve been working on, and hope you love listening to it as much as we love playing it!!.
King Hannah – 2021 Tour Dates October 16 – Liverpool, UK @ District October 20 – Manchester @ YES (Pink Room) October 21 – Leeds @ Hyde Park Book Club October 22 – Glasgow @ Broadcast October 23 – Newcastle @ The Cluny October 24 – Leicester @ The Cookie October 25 – Oxford @ Jericho Tavern October 26 – Birmingham @ Hare & Hounds October 27 – London @ The Lexington October 28 – Brighton @ Hope & Ruin October 29 – Bristol @ The Louisiana
We have always loved the Bruce Springsteen album “Nebraska”, how sparse and raw it sounds, and how it is effectively a live demo recording. We wanted to keep that live-feel when covering State Trooper and so we tracked the song live in our little home studio. We tried to do justice to the atmosphere of the original when arranging the track, with rumbling tom-heavy drums, warm creamy guitars and intimate slap-back vocals.
Sometimes a band arrives out of nowhere, with a fully formed sound ready to fill a stadium. King Hannah are one of those bands. The Liverpool band led by the creative force of Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle have arrived with ‘Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine’, an EP that is both soothing in its moods and intoxicating in its rushing soundscapes, containing a sound that is both brand new and completely mature. Their neon guitar lines and intimate torchlight vocals put the everyday on a pedestal, lifted by melodic licks that swell into dense and swirling atmospheric textures.
‘Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine’ sounds like late nights and early mornings, from the beauty and closeness of acoustic guitar in opener “And Then Out Of Nowhere, It Rained”, to the final immersive thicket of distorted guitars in “Reprise (Moving Day)”. In between, “Meal Deal” is smoky backroom Americana transposed onto the precarity of finding somewhere to live; “Bill Tench” feels like melancholic euphoria of travelling in fast cars at night – drums flash past like lines on the asphalt with angular guitars. “Crème Brûlée” is a moody fugged-out ballad for the everyday, and “The Sea Has Stretch Marks” conjures a whirling post-rock exploration of cinematic memories. King Hannah lean in to immersive moments in their music. “We want people to get lost in the music,” says Craig.
Craig formed King Hannah before Hannah knew anything about it. He had seen her performing years before, but they didn’t meet until she was assigned to show him the ropes at the bar job they’d both taken on to get by while still making music. He immediately pestered her to play some music with him, and they started a routine, spending the hours before work at Craig’s house, where for a long time Hannah could not pluck up the courage to play him her own music. “That went on for a year,” said Hannah, while Craig just waited patiently for her to play. When they finally got to writing their own songs together, everything clicked into place.
Both had played in bands before, but until they started King Hannah, neither had found what they were looking for. Hannah grew up in Tan Lan, the world’s smallest village in North Wales, and can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a singer. Craig started playing guitar age 13, and was taught Jackson Browne songs by his older brother. Within a year he was playing in bands. All this changed as soon as they formed King Hannah. “It’s just about finding the right people. When I go to Craig with some chords and lyrics, he just gets it,” says Hannah. “If we hadn’t found each other, I don’t know where we would be,” says Craig.
Led by Hannah and Craig, the density of their sound comes from the combination of their guitar and vocals with support from Ted White, Jake Lipiec and Olly Gorman. Inspired by the vocals of Mazzy Star and guitars of Kurt Vile, Hannah writes lyrics first thing in the morning and lets her mind spill onto the page, and they contain all the raw vulnerability and mundane reflections of that mental space. This vulnerability is something Hannah feels acutely on stage, but is also what makes their music so magnetic. “There’s nothing pretend about us,” she says – the grit in their sound and her voice speaks volumes. “We don’t want to sound clean or polished,” says Craig, “we want to sound real, and dynamic and authentic.”
Who are King Hannah? the Liverpool duo of Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle whose shimmering, atmospheric alt-pop is the perfect soundtrack to midnight journeys through neon-lit skylines. The Breathtaking debut single “Creme Brûlée” is a captivating melange of The XX, Mazzy Star and Pink Floyd, as Merrick understated vocals remain dazzlingly powerful. The Follow-up single, the lo-fi acoustic Meal Deal, sees them channel their Kurt Vile influences for a vulnerable cut of modern Americana.
Merrick and Whittle met at a bar they were working at, with the latter urging her to make music together. This went on for a whole year before Merrick plucked up the courage to agree to write together. The rest is history. Thank god!
Their EP “Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine” is out now via City Slang Records Releases November 20th, 2020
King Hannah’s sound is both soothing in its moods and intoxicating in its rushing soundscapes. Their neon guitar lines and intimate torchlight vocals put the everyday on a pedestal, lifted by melodic licks that swell into dense and swirling atmospheric textures.
Getting excited about new music gets harder with age and I know I dedicated an entire mailout to that topic. But it can still happen and Liverpool’s King Hannah are already one of my favourite new bands of the year, despite having only released two songs so far. Well, to be honest, I already had the chance to listen to their forthcoming debut EP so I can tell you the first tracks are no lucky shot at all. Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle deliver raw, unfiltered, mellow and heavily old-fashioned indie rock vibes that feel like a grittier version of Mazzy Star. And yes, it might be retro but I think it’s also a bold move to release songs like Meal Dealwho are almost eight minutes long.
They don’t care about certain lengths for intros, outro and all that stuff, they like to lose themselves in the music and the hazy and hypnotizing effect it can have. The last two minutes of this new single are a prime example here. They need this moment to unfold their raw beauty. King Hannah are up for greatness, if it’s up to me and I can only hope that this is the start of something bigger. Their debut EP Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine arrives on November 20 via City Slang.
The Fat Angel Sings 