Vaults - Premonitions

We know music shouldn’t be a tick box exercise. It should be about passion, emotion, finding something that you can utterly immerse yourself in, but let’s be honest with you, we’re big fans of the sort of music that contains female vocals, electronic instrumentation and is pop but not necessarily the sort of pop that is going to be played on constant rotation on daytime UK radio and finding itself nestling up to the likes of Katy Perry and Rihanna. Sometimes of course this type of pop does cross over (hi Lorde, hi Ellie Goulding), but usually it dances in the shadows rather than the spotlight. 

Here’s a fine example of that sort of pop that ticks all our boxes gets us pretty excited. Vaults first cropped up as New Wave on these pages last September and received a surge of blog praise for their debut song Cry No More. Since then they’ve been laying pretty low, just cropping up on a Rob Da Bank’s session on Radio 1 and announcing that they’ll be playing at Latitude and Festival No.6 later this year. Now they’re beginning to show that they do have more than one song with this - Premonitions - which is out on one of our favourite singles labels National Anthem on the 9th June (although available to stream right here right now). In case you forget National Anthem has been responsible for early single releases by acts such as Haim, CHVRCHES and Brolin. Apparently National Anthem begged Haim to let them release their first single in the UK and then thought 'oh we don't have a label, we'd better start one.' That's what we call passion, not planning.

Even if lyrically Premonitions seems to be dealing with the concept of disappointment it doesn’t do so musically. 

As yet we haven't been told that much about Vaults, and many blogs will tell you they are a 'mystery band', which is frankly lazy and untrue unless you're just reading the PR guff, because with just three minutes of Google searching we found out that lead singer Blythe was born in Herefordshire, has been making music for some time, (look up Bizali and her solo work under the name Blythe Pepino), that on Rob da Bank’s session they played an instrument that we've never heard of before called an aluphone, and they’re not to be confused with shaggy haired  rockers The Vaults from Suffolk, last heard of about 10 years ago, even although two of Valuts have spent time in the same neck of the woods geographically. Oh and despite a press shot that makes them look all moody (here), they seem to be pretty normal and even dare we say it smiley in 'real life' (here). Mind you, we reckon even Van Morrison would raise a smile at Da Bank being dressed like that.

Anyway, for now we’ll forgive them for the lack of information (we seem to be saying this a lot recently, it started with rule 14 here), it’s all about not giving too much away whilst creating buzz isn’t it? Don’t let buzz put you off though, Premonitions is brooding magnificent shadow pop at its best and worth your undivided attention. 

Vaults - Premonitions