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New Portals Interview
New Portals are a thrilling indie-electronic Belfast duo which have recently unveiled the video for their new single ‘Cage’ which follows previous work ‘Stay Here Tonight’ and the highly acclaimed ‘Groove Boy’ which saw the band picked out as The Guardian’s ‘New Band Of The Week’. An incredible brother-sister act of music that you need to listen to. We sat down with them to gauge the vibe.
Your new video Cage has just been released just few days ago. Give us an insight into this video?
Hey! Let's start by saying: thanks for having us. The cage video came around when we discovered the work of Hilow films. They sent us a pitch for the Video and it immediately resonated something in us. We hadn’t really seen a concept like this since ‘pretty woman’ so we thought we’d just go for it. The process was really smooth and we chatted about how we wanted the female to appear empowered at the end of the vid rather than depressed and oppressed. We Love the guys look of defeat when she walks away from him at the end of the video.
If you had to choose three words to describe New Portals, or your music in general, what would they be?
Indie, catchy, electronic
What is your favourite track, you have written so far?
Ruth- I really like performing ‘Stay Here Tonight’. We have 2 versions, an acoustic slow emotive version and a real 80s disco version which is so fun to play live and party to. The song has a deep meaning actually about sickness so we always try to give our best whichever genre we are doing.
How does it feel like to receive such a great critical acclaim?
We are so grateful for all the support we’ve received and still get such a buzz when we reach milestones. Like yesterday my friend who works in Starbucks messaged to say our track Do it Right was playing in store and sure enough it got playlisted in Starbucks. We were totally over the moon by these little gems of progress.
How do you start to compose and write your songs?
We are really good at writing top lines and melodies and could release hours worth of material of our crazy tunes we are addicted to writing. So yeah one of us will come up with a Melody first usually with keys then we add the vocal beats to give some energy… and lyrics usually come last.
Who would you say they influenced your own music?
I still really enjoy the top lines of Amelia from Sylvan Esso, her melodies are so interesting and catchy and Nicks production totally adds to this rather than distracts.
What’s your music guilty pleasure?
Growing up we always loved the Beddingfields!
Are there any singers would you like to perform with in the future?
Yeah Olly from years and years. Or Shura, Sylvan Esso!
What is the next step in New Portals career?
We have a busy autumn and we are hitting NYC and Spain in November for a few shows so we are starting to really get out there and gig.
You are granted a super power for a day - what would it be and what would you do?
Because I love city hopping I’d say to be able to teleport anywhere in the world and country hop without the whole sitting in a plane for hours. We’d get so much touring done!
Have a look at Cage:
