Previously featured on Folk Radio UK, Provincials are a dark-folk Hampshire-based duo pairing singer Polly Perry, formerly of Polly & the Billets Doux and guitarist Seb Hunter. Seb is also known as an author, having published the acclaimed cult bestseller Hell Bent for Leather.
Ahead of the release of their new album The Dark Ages (November 2019 via Itchen Recordings), Provincials are releasing a video for lead track Skara Brae, filmed by director Clive Tagg, and have made their back catalogue digitally available for the first time via Itchen Recordings. Watch the video below (to note: the first 20 seconds are silent)
Drawing from jazz, rock and folk Provincials cast a spell, conjuring a resonant, hypnotic soundworld recalling Pentangle, These New Puritans, Talk Talk and David Lynch‘s film soundtracks. On The Dark Ages the group has expanded its sonic horizons into wider-screen depths of bleak, prophetic vision – a lilting waltz from the mouths of shell-shocked WWI survivors (We Lost Our Minds), a breathless ode to a Victorian poet’s suicide (March into the Ocean), a withering Spanish revenge ballad (The Empire Line) and stark fingerpicked tales of doomed love (Skara Brae, The Same Sigh); all intermittently countered by blasts of cloud bursting ecstatic rock (Cat’s Cradle, Inkerman) – these ten new songs serve as vividly poetic soundtracks to failing discourse, with the looming backdrop of an ever more vitriolic and divided nation. Uniquely poised between sonic exploration and the direct, unadorned storytelling of English folk, theirs is a sound quite unlike any other.
Provincials have performed across the UK, including at the Purcell Room in London’s South Bank Centre, as well as Ronnie Scott’s and the Glastonbury Festival. They have been regularly played on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 6Music, BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, Resonance FM and the Arts Desk. Polly and Seb’s musical vision has been expanded for The Dark Ages with guest drums & piano from producer Dan Parkinson. As well as continuing to write and record, Polly and Seb have also made an as yet unreleased silent black-and-white medieval road movie Dark is a Long Way. The Dark Ages was recorded with Dan Parkinson at Wooden Heart studios in Andover, Hampshire.