Overmono and John Joseph Holt have shared ‘Knight In Shining Prada’, a centrepiece of Overmono’s forthcoming album Pure Devotion, due 7th August via XL Recordings.
The track began as a voice note. Holt, a celebrated British poet, recorded the vocal while walking his dog near his home in The Fens and sent it to Tom and Ed Russell without further context. “As soon as he sent it to us, it all just felt so perfectly familiar,” Ed has said. “It was one of those ones where we’re sat in the studio, and the hair is standing up on our arms.”
What followed was one of the most painstaking creative processes on the record. Overmono built the track on their Prophet analogue synthesiser during a writing retreat in Spain, working through more than 80 versions before the song reached its final form: glossy, light-filled electronics intersecting with a raw spoken vocal, the two elements in deliberate contrast.
The contrast is the point. Holt wrote the words as a tribute to his brother, Thomas Edward Holt, a carpenter and photographer who died by suicide on 10th January 2017, aged 31. “My brother Thomas had an incredibly adventurous soul that inspired everyone around him,” Holt has said. “To make something so positive out of something so crushing is the greatest gift. May this song remind people of loved ones they have lost and bring them closer to their hearts. If we play it loud enough, do you think they will hear us in heaven?”
Pure Devotion is out 7th August via XL Recordings. Overmono headline the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich on release night.
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