Tiny Ruins have reached peak empathy with both each other and their audience – ★★★★ MOJO
Since 2009, New Zealand band Tiny Ruins have been steadily making good, blissful indie rock… ‘Dorothy Bay’ is a great reintroduction to a beloved, steadfast indie band – Paste
The Crab / Waterbaby’ [is] achingly pretty – Stereogum
Lyrically, few do it better – sharply poetic, each revelation from Tiny Ruins takes your breath away – 8/10 Clash Music
Fullbrook synthesises these earthen poles of heaven and manmade hell over Nick Drake-like instrumentals – FLOOD Magazine
Once you get inside Fullbrook’s songs, they are little private worlds of their own – Guardian Australia
Ceremony is an album of hushed beauty and a love letter to the band’s native country and its landscape – Music OMH
The magic of Hollie Fullbrook and Tiny Ruins resides in their ability to take difficult subjects and frame them in a way that illustrates their ability to transcend the obvious. They walk on pathways leading in directions that aren’t always taken and Ceremony is a fit to anyone who likes to think outside the box For Folk’s Sake
Fullbrook’s light melodic touch, [and] deft arrangements, … coalesce in refined folk-rock songs – NZ Listener
There’s a reason they’re held in such high regard on New Zealand shores –Rolling Stone AU/NZ
Tiny Ruins team have created their own classic – 13th Floor
This is the most accessible and gorgeous effort yet – Muzic.net
Following close on the tail of their much-praised new album, Ceremony (out now via Ursa Minor in Aotearoa), Tiny Ruins – the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook – today share a new live version of current single ‘Out Of Phase’. You can watch the band in session from here, with Ceremony also streaming in full from here.
Tiny Ruins – Ceremony Sessions – Out Of Phase
Tiny Ruins celebrate the release of Ceremony (#2 on the NZ Album Charts) with an eight-date headline tour across the country kicking off this weekend at Loons, Lyttelton on Thursday, May 11, Port Chalmers Town Hall, Dunedin on Friday, May 12, and Sherwood, Queenstown on Saturday. May, 13. Tickets are on sale now from Banishedmusic.com.
The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human – and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how you can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, and surface into another new morning. Another new chance.
Ceremony washes in and takes you out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity,” says Fullbrook. Although the things Fullbrook was struck by are annotated across Ceremony as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook, Ceremony is not a watercolour ramble through the natural world. These songs are not afraid of getting earth under the nails, of digging deep into some of the hardest matters of human existence. How do you move from loss and grief to acceptance and some kind of peace? How do you live knowing that you are surrounded by forces far beyond your control?
Ceremony’s productions are maximal, deep, complex. No moment is squandered without a clever polyrhythm, a curious harmonic tension introduced, an unexpected timbre. The intuitive weave of instrumentation – from Alex Freer’s deft and inventive drumming and Cass Basil’s conversational bass lines to Tom Healy’s lightening-strikes of electric guitar – land Fullbrook’s hard songs in an blissfully warm bedrock of sound – steadied in a kind of musical trust fall.
ABOUT TINY RUINS
A rare blend of eloquent lyrical craft and explorative musicianship, the songs of Tiny Ruins are etched into the memories of crowds and critics worldwide. Traversing influences that cross genre and era, the artistry of Hollie Fullbrook and her band spans delicate folk, lustrous dream pop and ebullient psychedelia. Building on the sparse arrangements and a novelist’s eye for detail cultivated over the past several years, the group’s greatly anticipated fourth album, Ceremony, is out on Ba Da Bing Records, Marathon Artists, Courtney Barnett’s label Milk! Records, and the band’s own imprint Ursa Minor in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
1. Dogs Dreaming
2. Daylight Savings
3. Diving & Soaring
4. In Light Of Everything
5. Out Of Phase
6. Dorothy Bay
7. Seafoam Green
8. Earthly Things
9. Dear Annie
10. Sounds Like
11. The Crab/Waterbaby
Tiny Ruins online
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