Bambara announce new album "Birthmarks" out 14th March via Bella Union || Share lead single "Pray To Me" || Spring 2025 UK & EU Tour

Brooklyn trio Bambara announce their long-awaited and brilliantly adventurous new album Birthmarks out 14th March via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement the band have shared propulsive lead single and album highlight “Pray To Me” – watch the video HERE. Additionally, the band have announced news of an extensive UK & EU tour for April and May 2025. All dates are listed below.

Commenting on the track’s offbeat and noir-esque narrative Bambara vocalist Reid Bateh says: “Pray To Me is about a one-eyed man arriving at a country karaoke night with a knife in his pocket and a plan to win over a girl called Elena, the object of his obsession. His fantasy unravels, murderously, when he sees her kissing a stranger at the bar.”

An extraordinary, nocturnally-inclined modernist rock band drenched in Southern Gothic, Bambara have evolved their macabre vision to perfection with their fifth album Birthmarks. Created in collaboration with co-producer Graham Sutton from UK experimental pioneers Bark Psychosis (a man also heavily responsible for the groundbreaking These New Puritans records), it’s not so much a concept album as a stunningly complex work of narrative fiction, featuring memorable characters including the aforementioned C&W karaoke-bar siren with halo-braided hair and a one-eyed murderer begging for the electric chair – all not exactly set to music, but actually born from it.

The three members of Bambara – singer-guitarist Reid Bateh, his twin brother Blaze Bateh (drums), and bassist William Brookshire – first started playing together in junior high school in Atlanta, GA and pretty much every moment ever since then have been obsessively honing their sound and vision; first moving to Athens, GA and finally heading to Brooklyn where they’ve established their long-term base.

Their story really picks up pace after 2020’s breakthrough Stray album – a record whose volatile and frequently explosive wall of sound offered a gnarly backdrop for Reid’s typically twisted midnight narratives. Having toured with Idles and Gilla Band pre-pandemic (both big fans), this was the record – powered by their propulsive ‘Serafina single’ and widespread 6Music support – that really put them on the map on both sides of the Atlantic. They were duly signed to Bella Union (Wharf Cat in the US), who for the first time afforded them a budget to hire a producer for what became Birthmarks. Travelling to Ramsgate in Kent to record with Sutton in 2023, they sought to continue to revolutionize their sound beyond what many deemed their ‘post-punk’ leanings. 

Says Blaze, “Graham was great at pushing us away from old habits, getting us to think of the same moments in a song with completely different lighting, or from different camera angles. We talked a lot about music that puts you in a cinematic space, like Sade and Portishead, and we focused more on the beats than we would in the past. We wanted it to move in a different way; we wanted certain moments to breathe.”

In stark contrast with Stray’s reverb-heavy, squalling-guitar mania, Birthmarks opens with ‘Hiss’, where an eerily foreboding Lynchian calm prevails as slo-mo drums, tense synths and ominous sub-bass soundtrack a lurid tale of a fleeting motel-room sexual encounter, its desolate middle-American mood recalling Springsteen in his ‘Nebraska’ prime. 

Brookshire says he’d write on synth-bass, and there are less guitars across the record as a whole. As well as synths, they broadened their range of instrumentation, with guests providing sax, trumpet, vibraphone, harp, violin, viola and four different female voices (including Madeline Johnston from Midwife and Emma Acs of Crack Cloud). 

Amid all that aural ambition, Bambara left Ramsgate not quite sure of what they’d created, and ultimately spent a good few months enthusiastically restructuring much of the record, communicating with Sutton remotely from their Brooklyn basement studio, often using manipulated samples of stuff they’d already recorded. Laughs Blaze, “We just can’t half-ass any of our records. We have to start an album, and let it find us – see what happens and let the music evolve us, instead of forcing ourselves to evolve in a certain prescribed way”.  

For Reid, however, whose MO for penning lyrics is a direct response to the soundscapes the three of them spirit up together, this slow gestation was something of a nightmare. “I was starting to make things up that had no basis in an actual song yet, and it was really fucking with my head,” says this blood-and-thunder writer of the old school. “It was a real tough one. It usually takes me a month, but this time it took… How long was it? I’m really bad at time – five months? Five months of pretty much total isolation. When I write, I do it every day, and I don't do anything else.”

Since moving to Brooklyn, Reid’s lyrics have reflected on the often surreal reality of growing up in the American South. Inspired by Southern Gothic novelists including Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, as well as the Louisiana jazz poet Yusef Komunyakaa, the stories in each song may seem to UK listeners to be unfolding in some semi-mythical bygone age, but, says Reid, “They absolutely have a basis in reality. I write about things that I feel I have enough experience with, and understanding of, that I myself have seen or experienced, or have friends that have. I never want it to feel like fantasy.” 

Birthmarks without doubt represents Reid’s most sophisticated writing to date. Even Bambara’s first chaotic records, ‘Dreamviolence’ (2013) and ‘Swarm’ (2016) had some kind of thematic thread, and 2018’s ‘Shadow of Everything’ had a linear through-narrative from beginning to end. With ‘Stray’, which was peopled by characters he dreamt up from faces in random old photographs, he began to scramble the songs to bury the storyline, and this latest outing takes that process to even greater lengths, with submerged layers of meaning. 

Bambara are a once-in-a-generation band of intrepid experimentation and compulsive storytelling. For those who crave potent and electrifying music in the lineage of its most celebrated literarily-inclined auteurs - Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen et al - they are, without question, the real deal.

Bambara UK & EU Tour:

Weds 16 April – FR, Nantes – Stereolux 

Fri 18 April – NL, Tilburg – Roadburn Festival 

Sat 19 April - LU, Esche – Out Of The Crowd Festival

Tues 22 April – UK, Brighton – Komedia 

Weds 23 April – UK, Birmingham – Hare & Hounds

Thurs 24 April – UK, Leeds – Brudenell Social Club 

Fri 25 April – UK, Glasgow – Room 2 

Sat 26 April – UK, Salford – The White Hotel 

Mon 28 April – UK, Bristol – The Fleece 

Tues 29 April – UK, London – The Garage 

Thurs 01 May – BE, Brussels – AB Club 

Fri 02 May – NL, Groningen – Vera 

Sat 03 May – DE, Hamburg – Molotow 

Tues 06 May – SE, Stockholm – Bar Brooklyn 

Weds 07 May – NO, Oslo – Blä

Fri 09 May – DK, Copenhagen – Loppen 

Sat 10 May – DE, Berlin – Lido 

Mon 12 May – DE, Munich – Ampere 

Tues 13 May – DE, Cologne – Helios 37

Weds 14 May – FR, Reims – La Cartonnerie

Thurs 15 May – FR, Paris – La Maroquinerie 

Birthmarks artwork and tracklist:

1. Hiss

2. Letters From Sing Sing

3. Face Of Love

4. Pray To Me

5. Holy Bones

6. Elena’s Dream

7. Because You Asked

8. Dive Shrine

9. Smoke

10. Loretta