Acclaimed Brighton-based indie rock act Penelope Isles is led by sibling duo and co-songwriters and co-vocalists Lily and Jack Wolter. 2019 was a breakthrough year for the Wolters: they released their self-produced full-length debut Until The Tide Creeps In to critical applause globally. That same year, the act toured extensively to support the album: they shared stages with the likes of The Flaming Lips and The Magic Numbers, playing over 100 shows — and touring the States three times, including a stop at the inaugural New Colossus Festival.
Since the release of Until The Tide Creeps In, The Wolters have been busy with their own solo recording projects and collaborations with other artists, including Lost Horizons. They also spent time working on their highly-anticipated — and still not officially announced — sophomore album. (Word on the street is that we’ll be receiving details on that in the near future.)
The duo announced an extensive UK tour through November and December. If you’re in the UK — or if you’ll be in the UK during the late fall — you can check out the tour dates and ticket information on the band’s website. Hot on the heels of the tour announcement, the duo released “Sailing Still,” their forthcoming sophomore album’s first official single. “Sailing Still” is a cinematic track, centered around a brooding yet shimmering string arrangement, gently strummed guitar, thunderous drumming, a soaring hook and Lily Wolter’s achingly tender vocals. Sonically bearing a resemblance to Lily Wolter’s work with the aforementioned Lost Horizons, the heartbreakingly gorgeous track evokes a deep yet familiar yearning for peace in a mad, mad, mad world.
Directed by Jack Wolters, the recently released video is a gorgeously shot fever dream that follows Penelope Isles’ Lily Wolter as she walks through and in a series of different locations throughout their native UK including a winding stone staircase at the shore, endless meadows, the forests, quirky stores and elsewhere. The visual is edited in a way that each passage leads to a stranger and more surreal passage.
“Before the enforced break due to COVID-19, we spent pretty much all of 2019 driving ourselves around Europe and America having some incredible adventures as a band and it seemed that everything since then had been falling apart,” Penelope Isles’ Jack Wolter explains. “Writing and recording new music as a huge part of the recovery process and when making this film for ‘Sailing Still’ I wanted Lily and I to get back on the road somehow, as travelling has been such a massive part of our band ever since we began. So I had this idea of filming Lily in a myriad of places and scenarios, both urban and rural, coastal and inland. Mountains and rivers, council flats and tunnels, cafes and bridges. We drove up and down the country for a week, sleeping in the van, and waking up at the crack of dawn to start filming again. Reconnecting as a band again but also spending time together as brother and sister was special for filming this real heartbreaker of a song.”
