Description
An enthralling weave of cathartic, introspective spirituality and thrumming, industrial darkness; The Wounded Healer is the first full-length from PREYRS, the new incarnation of Irish singer-songwriter Amy Montgomery and her band as one formidable entity.
From the fourpiece’s new janiform name; a twisting, conflicting play on the tenderness and innocence of prayer and the deadly dance of prey and predator to the band’s fiercely independent journey, PREYRS is a project already steeped in story.
Busking on the streets of Belfast from the age of 15, Amy Montgomery met multi-instrumentalist Michael Mormecha a few years later and they’ve been working together ever since. Both songwriters in their own right, with Micheal fronting renowned Irish post-hardcore outfit Mojo Fury and working as a producer for artists including The Bonnevilles, his own Mojo Fury and Joshua Burnside, Amy was, until now, always the focus of their collaboration.
The Wounded Healer, their forthcoming first album as PREYRS alongside longtime guitarist Nolan Donelly and new bass player Ciarán McGreevy, represents a monumental shift in the way the band lives and breathes with creativity and collaboration unleashed as a fully fleshed out fourpiece, rather than writing and performing under Amy’s name alone.
Embracing this reinvention of the band at a fundamental level, PREYRS even reworked their writing and recording process. Amy and Micheal decamped to Canada’s Wolfe Island, a 48-square mile island on Lake Ontario, in the dead of winter and set up a studio on the ground floor of their small, otherwise quiet hotel. They spent a month overlooking the frozen lake, safe from the -20 degrees outside, and left having written the entirety of The Wounded Healer before Micheal recorded and produced it at his own Tree Song Studios just outside Belfast.
This profound seachange can clearly be heard in the music too, it’s raw, potent and intoxicating. Freed from the assumptions and expectations that might have followed their previous moniker, PREYRS have created something altogether different whilst simultaneously building on an already impressive oeuvre. Inspired by highly influential Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s writings on ‘the wounded healer’ which explore the concept of an entity, be it a person or a nation, developing the capacity for empathy and healing through welcoming and embracing their own past traumas and vulnerabilities, The Wounded Healer is itself proudly full of dualities, conflicts and juxtapositions.
After breathtaking album opener ‘Humble Eyes’, lead single ‘Wave of Wisdom’ immediately lays this concept bare as Amy’s incandescent delivery of uncertainty, “lesson learned / don’t know how / but here I am again / stronger than before”, soars over a defiantly discordant clash of alt-folk slide guitar and Mormecha’s pummeling industrial percussion.
Elsewhere, the high-octane ‘Zeros, Ones & Lies’ wrestles with the spiritual toll of being fed constant footage of atrocity and catastrophe by a media that accepts no responsibility for their part in the global race to the bottom. As such, the track bursts into furious life with urgent, double-time drums met by guitars distorted to the brink of destruction before the song all but caves in on itself as Amy quietly asks of us “Can you feel it? / like a river / it flows so silently / it flows so violently”. By contrast, ‘Bring Ur Bruises’ radiates resplendent, self-empowering positivity. Centred once again on the concept of the wounded healer, ‘Bring Ur Bruises’ implores the listener to welcome their trauma in, to own it and wear it as a paradoxical means of ultimately letting it go as triumphant, reverb-soaked guitars soar ever higher.
If it wasn’t already clear, PREYRS are no strangers to doing things differently and, across every iteration, the band have always taken a DIY approach to every aspect of their existence. From covering themselves in paint and rolling over every single early album cover to, until recently, booking all of their own shows and festivals as diverse as Glastonbury, Green Man (UK), Blizzarrrd Rock (GER) and Bloodstock (UK), last year the band found themselves touring the UK as Amy Montgomery in support of musical heroes and British post-punk legends New Model Army.
In November they will be joining New Model Army again on tour across Europe, but this time as PREYRS performing tracks from The Wounded Healer, the same four people but an entirely different beast.
FOR FANS OF
Nine Inch Nails, Chelsea Wolfe, Sonic Youth, Julie Christmas, Alanis Morissette, My Bloody Valentine, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Melvins
