Purple Pilgrims Share New Single ‘Outside’

New Zealand dream-pop duo Purple Pilgrims have shared new single ‘Outside’, the latest track to be taken from their forthcoming third album, Given To The Night, out 27 November via AD 93.

New Zealand dream-pop duo Purple Pilgrims have shared ‘Outside’, the latest single from their forthcoming third album, Given To The Night. Written during the same period of retreat and disconnection that shaped the wider record, the track sits with feelings of isolation, transition and the strange comfort of being slightly removed from the world. Its lyrics, ‘Last year I felt dead inside, now I’m feeling so alive / Looking from the outside in, again’, catch that sense of watching life from a small distance.

Speaking about the new single, Purple Pilgrims describe ‘Outside’ as ‘an ode to outsiders’, adding that a word which once felt heavy now feels ‘like an anointed privilege’. They continue: ‘Relishing a space of one’s own. The feeling of putting on headphones and walking through the world, of it and others at the same time, is a sacred space that most of us can relate to, we think.’

Given To The Night was recorded after sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon stepped back from daily noise, deleting social media and retreating into the trees of their native New Zealand. According to the duo, the songs came together through a process of instinct rather than fixed intention: ‘We recorded songs as they appeared, which sometimes felt like catching light. Before we realised it we had a record.’

The album also features previous single ‘Innocence Lost’, which arrived in September, and continues the sisters’ long-running interest in analogue texture, layered vocals and music that sits somewhere between dream-pop, experimental folk and the stranger corners of guitar music. Written during a period of personal change, the record moves through insomnia, grief, joy, confusion and clarity, with its title reflecting both an attraction to night-time and the act of surrendering to it.

Purple Pilgrims will mark the release with two New Zealand shows in December. They play Kāhui St David’s in Auckland on 5 December as part of Strange Universe Fest, with Schofield Strangelove, before heading to Vogelmorn Hall in Wellington on 11 December with Mercury Fèng.

Given To The Night is out on 27 November via AD 93.