Scottish four-piece The Ninth Wave have shared their new single “I’m Only Going to Hurt You,” exclusively via Paste. The track serves as the second single from their forthcoming EP Happy Days!, out on July 31 via Distiller Records and produced by The Horrors’ Faris Badwan. The band’s debut album, Infancy, was released last year, and it was just nominated for “Best Independent Album” at the AIM Independent Music Awards 2020. The Ninth Wave made two U.S. festival appearances last year at Austin’s SXSW and New York City’s New Colossus.
The group’s tantalizing gothic electro-pop is back in full swing on this new single. Intricate programmed drums dance around their luminescent synths and Haydn Park-Patterson’s melodramatic croon. The idea for this song stemmed from one of Park-Patterson’s poems called “My Severed Heart,” written in the early summer of 2019. The song comes with an accompanying vertical video of Park-Patterson riding the Glasgow underground.
Park-Patterson says of the new track:
“I’m Only Going To Hurt You,” the second single from our upcoming Happy Days! EP, is a song that has existed in so many forms that it is hard to recognise the original demo and the final recording as the same song. It started out life in the form of one of my (Haydn’s) poems, “My Severed Heart,” from which the pre chorus and chorus lyrics were taken. Since then it’s been dragged through different arrangements, keys and styles until we almost decided to scrap it. It wasn’t until Calum, Kyalo and Millie reimagined the backbone of the song that things fell into place. The main rhythmic elements of this song were made on Millie’s Elektron Digitakt, using field recordings of scrap bits of metal that surrounded the studio. The song itself is centred around an internal conflict faced after realising the difficulties of a relationship that seemed to be damaged even before it was allowed to flourish.
Listen to “I’m Only Going to Hurt You,” exclusively via Paste below.
