The Veils strip away all excess on Fragile World, for a record that feels less constructed than uncovered, with songs revealing themselves further with each listen.
Less than a year after the haunting beauty of Asphodels, the Veils are back with an album that trades quiet reflection for raw instinct. Fragile World finds Finn Andrews and company embracing uncertainty, trusting impulsiveness over perfection, and emerging with one of the most in your face records of their two-decade career.
Recorded live to tape in New Zealand by engineer Paddy Hill and produced by Tom Healy, Fragile World feels like it has a life of its own from the opening moments. Gone is the polish that sometimes comes with modern studio recordings. Instead, the album thrives on first instincts, happy accidents, and performances that capture musicians chasing down songs in real time.
"We went into the studio with a lot of songs, but very little idea of the arrangements," Andrews has said, and that leap into the unknown defines the album's character. With only a few weeks to shape the material, Andrews and Healy handled much of the instrumentation themselves, joined at key moments by drummer Joseph McCallum. The result is music that shakes with nervous energy, where transparency becomes its greatest strength.
The title Fragile World carries a double meaning. It reflects an era where political, cultural, and social foundations often seem perilously unstable, while also describing the delicate architecture of songwriting itself. Every song is built from countless small creative decisions, each one capable of sending it in down a completely different path. That tension between chaos and creation is what makes the album thrive.
Since signing his first record deal as a teenager, Finn Andrews has steered the Veils through a remarkable evolution. Across eight studio albums, the band has balanced gothic grandeur with intimate confession, earning a reputation as one of alt rock's more compelling voices. Their music has attracted admirers far beyond the indie world, appearing in films by David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Paolo Sorrentino, while collaborations like 2016's Total Depravity, produced with Run The Jewels' El-P, proved the band's willingness to push beyond familiar territory. For a band more than 20 years into its journey, Fragile World sounds like a band beginning a new one.