Pen pictures of deadbeats, fools, hopeless romantics and wanderers continue to pour from the forthcoming two albums from The Coral, each vividly drawn into living within the flickering light of rich, mid-century, cinematic instrumentation, as they release The Sinner – OUT NOW. Drawn from the physical formats-only release of 17-track album, Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show, out on Fri 8 September 2023, the song sits at the crossroads where the band’s heavenly, harmonic joy meets the growling pains of stolen souls.
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Writing a second-hand postcard from the land they now call their own, Coral Island, the subject of their widely-acclaimed 2021 double album of the same name, to their newest conceptual domain, that of forthcoming album, Sea Of Mirrors’ drowned Italian western films sets, Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show is a broken broadcast of spoken word and song. The Sinner joins the recent release of Drifter’s Prayer, featuring the actor, John Simm, as one of the only songs from the purposely analogue Holy Joe… album hitting digital formats.
Fitting into the band’s preoccupations with the undersides of cinema history, The Sinner was inspired by 2019 Irish film, Calm With Horses. With tremelo guitars, a rhumba rhythm and a conscious effort to sketch out the sound of a band plying its trade on stages in smokey 6o’s dives, the track’s sense of the sinister, of deals gone wrong and no solutions sitting at the bottom of a glass, slots it effortlessly into The Coral’s extensive songbook.
James Skelly says of the track: “I was trying to imagine ‘Calm With Horses’ as a noir with a soundtrack by a nameless Merseybeat group that only exists in a half-forgotten dream.”
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