Australian desert psych quartet Stonefield are excited to announce a run of new US tour dates. The new dates begin on November 8 with a stop at Levitation Festival in Austin, TX before taking the group up the East Coast, concluding on November 14 at the new Sultan Room in Brooklyn, NY. See below for the full list of currently-announced dates.
The band is comprised of four sisters — Amy, Hannah, Sarah and Holly Findlay — who started practicing together in their parents’ farm shed as teenagers and have only continued to rise in popularity since. Their new album BENT (Flightless / ATO) hit stores shortly before the band joined King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and ORB for a North American tour in August and September. The tour saw the group performing in iconic venues across the country, including Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, NYC’s Central Park SummerStage and Stubb’s in Austin, Texas. The dates followed Stonefield’s own 37-date tour of Europe and the UK, which includes several festival stops at Desertfest, The Great Escape, Maifeld Derby, Freak Valley Festival, and Indie Rocket Festival.
BENT was recorded by Joe Walker and Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in just five days. Written largely on the road, the songs on BENT are filled with reference and reflection — the kind that comes from months spent far from home, living on four wheels. The surreal isolation of trudging through white-out snow and snaking down deserted highways served as the perfect backdrop for the band to look inward. “It’s a culmination of experiences, emotions, and stories collected over time,” explains lead singer and drummer Amy Findlay, “A growth of honest, raw, energy that has been burning within us and waiting for its moment.”
From practicing in their family shed as teenagers in rural Australia, to touring the world with Fleetwood Mac, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, King Tuff, and King Gizzard, it’s been a strange trip for the four Findlay sisters. As Stonefield, they’ve got three albums and thousands of miles under their belts, plus plenty of perspective on what it’s like to fight to make a place for themselves, and tell their own story.
Written largely on the road in America earlier this year, the songs on BENT are filled with reference and reflection–the kind that comes from months spent far from home, living on four wheels. The surreal isolation of trudging through white-out snow and snaking down deserted highways served as the perfect backdrop for the band to look inward, taking stock of the journey they’ve taken thus far as musicians, and as people. “It’s a culmination of experiences, emotions, and stories collected over time,” explains lead singer and drummer Amy Findlay, “A growth of honest, raw, energy that has been burning within us and waiting for its moment.”
Recorded in just five days with Joe Walker and Stu Mackenzie from King Gizzard at their studio in Melbourne, the album is almost 100% live. Besides being an impressive feat and the flexing of a confident band operating at the height of their powers, that immediacy lends the album a distinct, crackling energy–thunder, lightning, and muscle-bound horsepower. “Sleep” opens the album with guitars covered in five inches of sludge and distortion and something that sounds like a far-off siren, or the high-pitched howling of the wind. It serves as a warning, a call to arms, kicking things off with a next-level version of the massive, unholy racket the band has become known for over the course of their last three albums.
The sonic inspiration taken from listening to Black Sabbath, Beak, Deep Purple, The Alan Parsons Project, and Mike Oldfield inject BENT with its sternum-shaking heaviness and ever-present swagger, but also its exploratory fearlessness–letting the songs loose to twist and turn, sticking to no one’s rules but their own. Take the proggy, keyboard-soaked intro at the top of “People,” or the cheeky combination of tinnitus-inducing hard rock and hip-shaking boogie at the core of “Dead Alive.” “Don’t make me think I’ve lost control / I know exactly what you said / Don’t make me think it’s in my head,” Amy sings during the latter, keeping the lyrics as defiant as the music.
“The album is about our own experiences and stories,” explains Amy, “Songs about the fear of walking home alone at night, stories of what it’s like being an all-female band and the power of supporting one another.” With that being the lyrical subject, the music that came out is definitely our heaviest.” It’s clear that darker thoughts were on the Findlay sisters’ mind– “Route 29,” with its suspenseful synth intro was inspired by the creepy The Route 29 Stalker podcast the band was listening to as they drove the namesake road on their way to a gig with King Tuff, and the cascading synth line and slinky restraint of the hi-hat on “If I Die” can only distract so much from the song’s terror-stricken lyrics.
Stonefield 2019 tour dates
11.7 – Austin, TX @ Levitation Festival
11.8 – Austin, TX @ Levitation Festival
11.9 – New Orleans, LA @ Santos
11.10 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
11.11 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings Raleigh
11.12 – Washington, DC @ Pie Shop Bar
11.13 – Providence, RI @ Fete Ballroom
11.14 – Brooklyn, NY @ Sultan Room
