Gently Tender are back. The South London six-piece have shared ‘A Mound A Field’, the lead single from their forthcoming EP ‘This Was Once Fields‘, out 22nd May via TODO Records. It is their first new music in nearly three years, and it arrives quietly heavy with everything that happened in between.
The time away was not chosen lightly. Since their 2022 debut album ‘Take Hold Of Your Promise!’, produced by Matthew E. White at Rockfield Studios, the band navigated four births, serious illness (including one member spending a year in intensive care), a lineup departure, and two others relocating out of London. What remained reassembled into something different. Sam Fryer, Pete Mayhew, and Will Doyle, all formerly of Palma Violets, are joined now by guitarist Adam Brown and two newer members: Francesca Brierley and Evie Hilyer-Ziegler. The band rebuilt, quietly, across studios scattered around the capital, working with engineer and producer Matt Wiggins.
A Walk That Became a Song
‘A Mound A Field’ is five minutes of slowly expanding atmosphere. Clash Magazine described it as having “a brooding charm, the introductory drones easing you into a song with a rich sense of atmosphere.” The single is rooted in something specific: a walk Fryer took two years ago, starting in Ridge, a small village in Hertfordshire, tracking south through the hills of North London, and ending at Temple on the north bank of the Thames.
“The song is capturing the moment when you’re walking the open fields and then are suddenly hit with the view of the vast open city,” Fryer says. “Being aware of the changes in emotion, how it changes the way you breathe, and how it compels you to meditate on all life on Earth, how it has developed for all good and worse.”
The video, directed by Maisy Banks, follows Fryer through that same territory, city and countryside bleeding into each other. It fits. The band’s sound has always been built from that tension: the pastoral pressing up against the urban, folk and soul pressing up against something more restless.
The EP and What Comes Next
The full tracklist for ‘This Was Once Fields’ reads: ‘A Mound A Field’, ‘Wild in the Uplands’, ‘Go Get It’, ‘10000 Steps from the door’, and ‘The City of the Beast’. The titles alone tell you where Fryer’s head has been. He has spoken about walking London’s green belt for 14 years as a way out of his windowless studio in Haringey. “I never imagined it would provide me with so much inspiration,” he said.
It has provided me with a universe of material that I can dive back into when I need to escape, and that’s where this music was born”
The band will play The Great Escape in Brighton on 15th May, headline the ICA in London on 27th May, and appear at All Together Now in County Waterford on 1st August. Tickets for the ICA show are available now.
‘This Was Once Fields’ is out 22nd May on TODO Records.
