3 (Dinked Edition #421)

Penelope Isles returns.

After a brief disappearance into solo records and restless touring, Wolter siblings Jack and Lily resurface with 3: a record drenched in salt and sun, with the tide pulling at its edges.

Three years have gone by since the band’s last show. Somewhere in between, life happened. Lily spent six months in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, trading songs for surfboards and stepping back from music for the first time in years. When Jack went out on the road with CMAT, Lily started a band of her own. ‘3’ is the sound of this magnetic songwriting duo finding each other again.

Written on a monthlong surf trip to Lagos, Portugal, these are songs with sandy feet and sunburnt shoulders, hooks that glow and harmonies that ache. Beauty built carefully, like a perfect sandcastle on a summer holiday, only to be flattened in an instant by your auntie’s passing cruelty. There's sweetness here, but it comes with teeth.

A year later, the band flew to the Isle of Lewis off Scotland’s northwest coast to record the album live at Black Bay Studio. Perched on a sheltered harbour, twenty miles from the nearest shop, the refurbished fish factory was the first room the band had ever recorded in outside their home studio.  Engineers Pete and Cal, truly dedicated to the island they live on, held the room for ten days, offering the kind of generous, unhurried attention that lets a record breathe. The remote landscape pulled the Isles into new, thrilling territory. They kept binoculars close by, peering through the soaring live-room window to scan the sprawling coastal view for white eagles and dolphins.

3 is record of firsts for the Brighton-based band. The first as a true three-piece, with close friend Joe Taylor (Anna B Savage, Iona Zajac) joining on drums, and the first they’ve ever recorded live. Jack and Lily trade shimmering guitars and sunlit harmonies like shared secrets, while Joe Taylor anchors it all: falsetto drifting wistfully above, drums crashing below. These are songs that read like postcards or pages ripped from a diary and slipped under someone's door. Recording the album live has kept the ink wet and the page still warm.

The album carries a lot of the band’s adopted hometown of Brighton. 'Bom Bane's' is named for the off-kilter Kemptown restaurant the band orbited. ‘Embo' is two verses long and a nostalgia-soaked love letter to a seafront flat at Embassy Court, and the people and memories that passed through it. Most of all 3 is an album made from a lot of love for each other, and the people who have been a part of the band’s lives over the last few years. "Jack and I are blood," says Lily. "Sometimes we're both in tears because of how special it feels."

Still obsessed with love, with heartbreak, with what lingers after, Penelope Isles carve out something new here. A shifting coastline of sound: hazy, luminous, and always on the verge of collapse. 

“Penny Isles is such a big part of our personalities,” says Jack. “So it’s about time we got back to it.”

Side A

A1. Another Kind of Love

A2. I Loved You, Robert Pattinson

A3. Bon-Bane’s

A4. Birthdays

A5. Embo

Side B

B1. Pretty In Pixels

B2. Moonwalker

B3. You Think You’ve Got A Way With Dogs

B4. Thinking Seat

B5. Am I Going Through This On My Own?