Today, Brooklyn trio Bambara announce their long-awaited and brilliantly adventurous new album Birthmarks out on 14th March via tastemakers Bella Union. To celebrate the announcement the band have shared the propulsive lead single and album highlight ‘Pray To Me. The band have also announced news of an extensive UK & EU tour for April and May 2025.
An intense kinetic, widescreen gothic opus, Bambara vocalist Reid Bateh describes nior- esqe single saying, ‘Pray to Me is about a one-eyed man arriving at a country karaoke night with a knife in his pocket and a plan to win over a girl called Elena, the object of his obsession. His fantasy unravels, murderously, when he sees her kissing a stranger at the bar.”
An extraordinary, nocturnally-inclined modernist rock band drenched in Southern Gothic, Bambara have evolved their macabre vision to perfection with their fifth album Birthmarks. Created in collaboration with co-producer Graham Sutton from UK experimental pioneers Bark Psychosis, it’s not so much a concept album as a stunningly complex work of narrative fiction, featuring memorable characters including the aforementioned C&W karaoke-bar siren with halo-braided hair and a one-eyed murderer begging for the electric chair – all not exactly set to music, but born from it.
The three members of Bambara – singer-guitarist Reid Bateh, his twin brother Blaze Bateh (drums), and bassist William Brookshire – first started playing together in junior high school in Atlanta, GA and pretty much every moment ever since then have been obsessively honing their sound and vision; first moving to Athens, GA and finally heading to Brooklyn where they’ve established their long-term base.
Their story really picks up pace after 2020’s breakthrough Stray album – a record whose volatile and frequently explosive wall of sound offered a gnarly backdrop for Reid’s typically twisted midnight narratives. Having toured with Idles and Gilla Band pre-pandemic (both big fans), this was the record – powered by their propulsive ‘Serafina single’ and widespread 6Music support – that really put them on the map on both sides of the Atlantic. They were duly signed to Bella Union (Wharf Cat in the US), who for the first time afforded them a budget to hire a producer for what became Birthmarks. Travelling to Ramsgate in Kent to record with Sutton in 2023, they sought to continue to revolutionize their sound beyond what many deemed their ‘post-punk’ leanings.
Says Blaze, “Graham was great at pushing us away from old habits, getting us to think of the same moments in a song with completely different lighting, or from different camera angles. We talked a lot about music that puts you in a cinematic space, like Sade and Portishead, and we focused more on the beats than we would in the past. We wanted it to move in a different way; we wanted certain moments to breathe.”
Birthmarks without doubt represents Reid’s most sophisticated writing to date. Even Bambara’s first chaotic records, ‘Dreamviolence’ (2013) and ‘Swarm’ (2016) had some kind of thematic thread, and 2018’s ‘Shadow of Everything’ had a linear through-narrative from beginning to end. With ‘Stray’, which was peopled by characters he dreamt up from faces in random old photographs, he began to scramble the songs to bury the storyline, and this latest outing takes that process to even greater lengths, with submerged layers of meaning.
Bambara are a once-in-a-generation band of intrepid experimentation and compulsive storytelling. For those who crave potent and electrifying music in the lineage of its most celebrated literarily-inclined auteurs including Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen et al – they are the real deal. Check them out.
Birthmarks is out on 14th March via Bella Union and is available to pre order here.
Bambara UK & EU Tour:
APRIL
16 – FR, Nantes – Stereolux
18 – NL, Tilburg – Roadburn Festival
19 – LU, Esche – Out Of The Crowd Festival
22 – UK, Brighton – Komedia
23 – UK, Birmingham – Hare & Hounds
24 – UK, Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
25 – UK, Glasgow – Room 2
26 – UK, Salford – The White Hotel
28 – UK, Bristol – The Fleece
29 – UK, London – The Garage
MAY
01 – BE, Brussels – AB Club
02 – NL, Groningen – Vera
03 – DE, Hamburg – Molotow
06 – SE, Stockholm – Bar Brooklyn
07 – NO, Oslo – Blä
09 – DK, Copenhagen – Loppen
10 – DE, Berlin – Lido
12– DE, Munich – Ampere
13 May – DE, Cologne – Helios 37
14 May – FR, Reims – La Cartonnerie
15 May – FR, Paris – La Maroquinerie
(photo credit: Jason Thomas Geering)
