Tiny Ruins (Marathon Artists, ★★★★ MOJO, 8/10 Clash) | live session video
TINY RUINS
RELEASE LIVE SESSION VIDEO FOR CURRENT SINGLE ‘OUT OF PHASE’
WATCH FROM HERE
NEW ALBUM CEREMONY OUT NOW VIA MARATHON ARTISTS
STREAM HERE
Tiny Ruins have reached peak empathy with both each other and their audience
★★★★ MOJO
Since 2009, New Zealand band Tiny Ruins have been steadily making good, blissful indie rock… ‘Dorothy Bay’ is a great reintroduction to a beloved, steadfast indie band Paste
The Crab / Waterbaby’ [is] achingly pretty Stereogum
Lyrically, few do it better – sharply poetic, each revelation from Tiny Ruins takes your breath away 8/10 Clash Music
Fullbrook synthesises these earthen poles of heaven and manmade hell over Nick Drake-like instrumentals FLOOD Magazine
Once you get inside Fullbrook’s songs, they are little private worlds of their own Guardian Australia
Ceremony is an album of hushed beauty and a love letter to the band’s native country and its landscape Music OMH
The magic of Hollie Fullbrook and Tiny Ruins resides in their ability to take difficult subjects and frame them in a way that illustrates their ability to transcend the obvious. They walk on pathways leading in directions that aren’t always taken and Ceremony is a fit to anyone who likes to think outside the box For Folk’s Sake
Following close on the tail of their much-praised new album, Ceremony (out now via Marathon Artists), Tiny Ruins - the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook - today share a new live version of current single ‘Out Of Phase’. You can watch the band in session from here, with Ceremony also streaming in full from here.
The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human – and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how you can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, and surface into another new morning. Another new chance.
Ceremony washes in and takes you out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau's (aka Auckland’s) Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity,” says Fullbrook. Although the things Fullbrook was struck by are annotated across Ceremony as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook, Ceremony is not a watercolour ramble through the natural world. These songs are not afraid of getting earth under the nails, of digging deep into some of the hardest matters of human existence. How do you move from loss and grief to acceptance and some kind of peace? How do you live knowing that you are surrounded by forces far beyond your control?
Ceremony’s productions are maximal, deep, complex. No moment is squandered without a clever polyrhythm, a curious harmonic tension introduced, an unexpected timbre. The intuitive weave of instrumentation - from Freer’s deft and inventive drumming and Basil’s conversational bass lines to Healy’s lightening-strikes of electric guitar - land Fullbrook’s hard songs in an blissfully warm bedrock of sound - steadied in a kind of musical trust fall.
Listen to Tiny Ruins’ ‘Out Of Phase’
Watch the ‘Ceremony Sessions’ Version of “Dogs Dreaming”
