Chugg Entertainment and Lunatic Entertainment are proud to announce the return of one of Britain’s most unique and captivating bands of the past five years, Wild Beasts. Having blown away audiences at the 2009 St Jerome's Laneway Festival where they proved to be the big surprise live act of the bill, the Mercury Prize nominated outfit return to Australia as part of Splendour in the Grass, with headline dates in Sydney at Oxford Art Factory on Wednesday 27th July and Melbourne’s Corner Hotel on Thursday 28th July.

The bands latest album, Smother was released on 13 May via Domino/EMI and is already receiving critical praise.

The album starts with a simple nagging pulse, some sparse piano and Hayden Thorpe’s opulent falsetto – only here he’s never sounded so haunted, threading through the skeletal arrangement and ominous spaces of ‘The Lion’s Share’ as it almost builds into a crescendo but then, brilliantly, doesn’t quit, maintaining instead its eerie tension until it evaporates. “It’s a terrible scare,” he sings, “but that’s why the dark is there: so you don’t have to see what you can’t bear.” For a brief delirious moment there’s a tiny icy blade right through your heart, and it’s clear that whatever our expectations of Wild Beasts, a band who’ve always gone their own strange, sweet way, they are about to be both confounded and exceeded.

‘Smother’ is the third album by Wild Beasts, four young men from Kendal in England’s Lake District, who, despite journeying towards the centre of things, on a trajectory that took them from Kendal to Leeds to London, still make music that retains the outsiderdom and intimacy a childhood spent in the Lake District informed. Like its predecessors ‘Limbo, Panto’ and the Mercury-nominated, much-loved ‘Two Dancers’, it is a genuinely brave, beautiful record that stands outside the vicissitudes of fashion, and sounds like nothing so much as itself. If ‘Two Dancers’ was a night on the tiles, dizzy and giddy and pulsing with hedonism, then ‘Smother’ is pillow talk. Intimate and sensual, it has the courage and confidence to talk softly, knowing that once it has the listener, it has them forever.

As ‘Two Dancers’ refined elements of ‘Limbo, Panto’ and veered off into uncharted territory, so ‘Smother’ explores the ‘erotic downbeat’ first hinted at on ‘Underbelly’ and ‘When We’re Sleepy’ from ‘Two Dancers’. For the first time on a Wild Beasts album, there are ten love songs; often delicate, never wimpish. Born out of an intense six week period of writing in East London and a month recording in remotest Wales, the songs make most sense in each other's company - as a suite whose full force isn't felt until the final notes die away. These ten songs reflect a band certain only of themselves. Like all the best art, it isn’t second-guessing its audience. It doesn’t even know if there is an audience. It’s born out of a moment of vulnerability (is anyone listening?) that, conversely, brings out the singular strengths of this most singular of bands. When they say “we never wanted to be four white boys playing guitar forever; we hope to be the kind of band that shouldn’t exist,” then you realise ‘Smother’ is the wonderful sound of four musicians being entirely true to their vision.

Do not miss your chance to see Wild Beasts take to the stage this winter.

TICKETS FOR HEADLINE SHOWS ON SALE THURSDAY 26th, 9AM

WILD BEASTS : TOUR DETAILS

Wednesday 27th July Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
www.moshtix.com.au 1300 438 849

Thursday 28th July Corner Hotel, Melbourne
www.cornerhotel.com or 03 9427 9198

For more information go to:
www.wild-beasts.co.uk
www.myspace.com/wildbeasts
www.chuggentertainment.com