Soak has announced details of her much-anticipated second album, Grim Town, as well as unveiling new single ‘Knock Me Off My Feet’. Also featuring beautiful returning track ‘Everybody Loves You’, Grim Town will be released on Rough Trade Records on April 26, with a run of shows across the US, UK and Europe additionally confirmed as below. Grim Town follows the success of Soak’s Mercury-nominated, multi-prize-winning debut album Before We Forgot How To Dream, and an extraordinary period of invention and self-discovery for the still-just-22-year-old Derry native.

The unique but universal world of Grim Town is tantalisingly introduced today in new single ‘Knock Me Off My Feet’ - a love letter to the lawlessness and freedoms of small-town culture, as well as its more claustrophobic, cut-you-down-to-size qualities. It’s about the idea too, says Bridie, that “you can be the best person to yourself, and the worst person to yourself”, a theme which is explored intensely across Soak’s ambitious, eclectic and brilliantly brave second album, Grim Town.

The central premise of Grim Town, says Soak, is “a dystopia that I’ve created in my brain: me on the inside, processed into a pretend location. The way I could wrap my head around a lot of what I was going through was to make it feel like something quite physical and real. Once I had the idea of the album being an actual location, exploring the dynamics of this town and what it would look or sound like felt like the right way to give my mental state a personality.” So if debut album Before We Forgot How To Dream was conceived as a time-capsule of innocence, vividly capturing those moments in adolescence when anything felt possible, Grim Town perhaps examines the reality: on what happens next after you enter adulthood (but actually feel more in crisis than ever), and the world around you isn’t what was promised to you or your generation.

A record about getting lost that you can also truly get lost in, Grim Town arrives as inspired by the audio-visual environmentalism of Pink Floyd’s The Wall as the production of Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene or Phoebe Bridges. Bridie tackles everything from long-distance love, depression, divorce and social anxiety to the changing modern landscape (sexually, politically, emotionally). And it’s accepting the jumble of emotions which make you ‘you’ that emerges as the ultimate message of Grim Town, with its suitably placeless universe in which everybody’s personal Grim Town looks different, but everybody’s matters.

3rd May - Liverpool Sound City Festival @ District - Liverpool, UK

5th May - Hit the North - Newcastle, UK

6th May - Library - Kendal, UK

10th May - Band On The Wall - Manchester, UK

11th May - Wardrobe - Leeds, UK

12th May - King Tuts - Glasgow, UK

14th May  - Hare and Hounds - Birmingham, UK

15th May - Academy 2 - Oxford, UK

16th May - Thekla - Bristol, UK

17th May - Islington Assembly Hall - London, UK

25th May - Ward Park - Bangor, UK (supporting Snow Patrol)

28th May - Live at St Lukes - Cork, IE

29th May - Dolan's - Limerick, IE

30th May - Button Factory - Dublin, IE

The Coathangers’ new album, The Devil You Know, is due out on March 8 via Suicide Squeeze Records. For 12 years, The Coathangers have been building an infallible reputation for chaotic punk rock and visceral live shows, but this sixth LP is a record that captures their established takes on vitriolic punk, playful house-party anthems, and heart-worn ballads and melds them all, revealing a new level of songwriting and nuance.

Now they have shared the album’s opening track and accompanying video, ‘Bimbo’, with guitarist/vocalist Julia Kugel saying: “‘Bimbo’ is a bittersweet note on love, self preservation, and letting go. It came together naturally and was one of the easiest songs to be written for the new record. It tells two sides of the story but still feels uplifting and positive. An acceptance of things the way they are.”

She continues: "The video was shot on our last European tour by us and our fellow road warrior Mackenzie Sutch. We spend a large part of our lives on the road and it felt right to make the first video off the new record a small documentation of that. Tour is bittersweet as well. It can be dreamy and harsh at the same time. Shot mostly in Spain and Portugal, the video for ‘Bimbo’ is a lovely memory of a complex emotional and physical journey. The video was edited by our good friend Nacho Montero from Madrid."

 ‘The Devil You Know’ track list:

1. Bimbo

2. 5 Farms

3. Crimson Telephone

4. Hey Buddy

5. Step Back

6. Stranger Danger

7. F the NRA

8. Memories

9. Last Call

10. Stasher

11. Lithium