Cult Irish avant-garde post-punk band Virgin Prunes have announced a new reissue of their album “A New Form Of Beauty”. The release comes on the heels of the critically acclaimed reissue of their Colin Newman-produced album “If I Die, I Die”, which came out in early 2023, and arrives via BMG on 8th March on 3LP and 2CD, alongside a media and artbook, new sleeve notes, remastered audio, and brand-new remixes from the band’s theatrical, award-winning frontman Gavin Friday, and Apparition.

The Virgin Prunes were masters of the uncanny, juxtaposing nightmares with lullabies, beauty with cruelty, combining gentle vocals and the spoken word with anguished wailing from purgatory itself. This album powerfully laid out this terrain. Its themes ranged from mournful tales of unrequited love, frustrated sexuality, morbid eroticism and wasted youth, to yearnings for distant dreamlands which were juxtaposed with macabre visions of dystopian societies, overpowered by dark forces and where demons run amok. Vocalist Guggi’s artwork for “A New Form of Beauty”, which intimates a heartless transaction within a domestic setting, is in keeping with this sensibility.

The album perfectly showcases the pioneering avant-garde elements of the band’s sound, combining elements of industrial, post-punk, darkwave, and sound collage – it’s no wonder why they’ve earned fans in everyone from Trent Reznor, Billy Corgan, Michael Stipe, Mark E Smith, Courtney Love, and many, many more. Singer and songwriter Gavin Friday’s career has spanned four decades and has seen him collaborate with his childhood friends in U2 (The Edge’s seclusive brother, Dik Evans was also in Virgin Prunes), as well as The Fall, Sinead O’Connor, Dave Ball, Scott Walker, Hal Willner, and Quincy Jones, and create music for Academy Award nominated films such as “In the Name of the Father” and “In America”.

“A New Form Of Beauty” begins with “Sandpaper Lullabye”, a la-la-la love song of child-like innocence that leaves a bitter aftertaste. What follows is a series of powerful hymns to desperation and revolt. “Come to Daddy”, in which Gavin and Guggi sing in dialogue while improvising, is a relentless soul scream about domestic violence, which ends with the ironic lines ‘Oh we are, we are so young. Oh, we have so much to look forward to.’ This is soon followed by one of the band’s most celebrated songs, the elegiac “Sweethome Under White Clouds”, and later on by “Beast (Seven Bastard Suck)”, one of their most brutal and notorious.

After the remix of the aforementioned “Sweethome Under White Clouds” by Apparition and Gavin Friday was shared last month, today sees the release of the rework of ‚Come to Daddy‚.

The Virgin Prunes’ “A New Form of Beauty” (1981) was recorded and produced by the band itself. It includes the tracks of the first four parts of what was a five-part, mixed-format project with Rough Trade Records. Part 1 was a 7” record, Part 2 was a 10”, Part 3 was a 12”: these were recorded between July and October 1981. Part 4 was ‘Din Glorious’, released as an audio cassette, was a recording of extracts of a live event on 8th November 1981 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. Part 5 and 6 were to be a film of ‘Performance, Exhibition, Event’ staged at the Douglas Hyde Gallery on 7th and 8th November 1981.

The 3LP deluxe edition features all four parts remastered from original tape in a tri-fold reverse board sleeve deluxe package with a 16-page 11” deluxe artbook containing brand new sleevenotes by Jon Wood and original Guggi drawings. The 2CD & digital deluxe editions all feature remastered audio with brand-new remixes and tape loop mashup by Apparition and Gavin.