Ex-Isles

Occupying the cleft between David Sylvian and late-era Bowie, Ex-Isles released their debut album Luxury Mass, recorded at home, to crticial acclaim in September 2018. Emerging as a collaboration between experimental composer and singer songwriter Pete Devlin, they have made a name for themselves as purveyors of beautiful, intelligent, complex, slyly witty avant-pop.

Pete and James are regular collaborators on a variety of other projects including a work for choir and electronics titled A Constellation Of Baragained Parts, and an album of experimental throbbing electronica called Devil, Repent! They also wrote and performed the music for a dance/opera piece in collaboration with the dance company Junk Ensemble, which was performed at Cork Opera House in 2019. 

Following the impressionistic, low key despair of their first album Luxury Mass, Ex-Isles will return in 2020 after being awarded a Help Musicians Grant to record at a studio in Eastbourne, with a passionate and sonically ambitious second album of invectives against both right wing populism and craven centrist appeals for reasonableness and third way incrementalism. Trapped between these two political realities that both serve to reinforce the status quo, are Ex-Isles’s songs, which, in their mineral sensuality, express radical joy and artistry through music making, while taking aim at the hypocrisies that are consolidating themselves into unjust facts of life: it is fundamentally protest music.