31 July 2025

Artists: DEAD AWAY
Who: British duo project that sets the dark lyricism of Kate Arnold against the music and soundscapes of Marc Symonds. A mix of poetry, electronica and guitars. A heady brew of dark, glitchy head-messing wonder.

TUTV: The duo has a sort of enigmatically attractive power that creates an aural
curiosity. It happens once again with this new EP. In 4 songs, lasting only 8 minutes
all together (a bit too short, guys) they draw you into their heartfelt psyche, lyrically
and musically.

Expect a melting pot of trip-hop dynamics, industrial echoes, schizo guitar scratches, distorted synths, drum/bass reverberations and Arnold‘s spoken word musings.

Mind you, This Or Broadmoor is not some arty-farty piece of work. There’s an organic catchiness that massages your ears and mind gently and makes your hips groovin’ smoothly. Okay, enough talk from yours truly.

Kate and Marc took the time to guide us through
This Or Broadmoor, track by track. Here we go,
fifty/fifty.

Kate: “The collection as a whole is around two themes: 1) the way older people (especially women) are viewed by society, and 2) generally taking stock of my own life so far.”

CRONE

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Kate: “I think ‘Crone’ is perhaps pretty self-explanatory – sure, the way women are
overlooked once they cease being viewed as of use sexually but also that their opinions
are often discounted due to their age, despite their experiences. Of course, this stuff
applies to men too – but I’m not one so can only speak from my own standpoint!”

CLOWN CAR
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Kate: “‘Clown Car’ is me berating myself for spending all my years turning my life into poetry and lyrics, when, really where has it got me? Would it not have been better to have just shut
up and got on with it, like any normal person?

The meaning of the EP titles comes in here too: Broadmoor is a high security mental
institution/prison in the UK – and I genuinely feel that if I hadn’t found the ability to turn
‘every stray thought and feeling’ into something lyrical then I’d have been in real trouble mentally. I know Marc feels the same about making music, so it’s an extension of that
feeling really: it’s Dead Anyway, or Broadmoor for us! “

A FEAR OF EXPLOSIONS

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Kate: “It’s a taking stock piece. It’s not a swipe at an ex; it’s more about learning through one’s experiences and the way those experiences shape you as you age. The ‘you’ it’s addressed to is any younger person, who may feel that age won’t ever come to them. As we all did, of course.”

ANOTHER NIGHT DONE

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Kate: “It’s quite simply, a list of my recent dreams that I was keeping! Marc came up with
a ‘groove’ one night in the studio and, seeing that he was on a roll, I just started putting them
to what he was doing and recorded the vocal there and then. It’s also, I guess, a nod to the EP title, since I’m aware that the whole lyric is fairly barking!”

Marc about the music:

“After writing ‘Unspoken Word’, ‘Partially Eaten by Animals’ and ‘Tough Listen’ in 2 years,
I felt musically exhausted. I genuinely thought that my best musical work was behind me and couldn’t see the point in any of it. Kate was still writing, however, and chose two tracks (‘Crone’ and ‘Clown Car’) from what she calls ‘the pantry’ of tracks I’d sent her over the years which she hadn’t already used.

This kicked me up the bum to come up with two new tracks, one of which (‘Fear of Explosions’) was written to a piece she’d already recorded into her phone at home (you may be able to tell this from the recording) and it was a real nod to how we were forced to do things due to Covid restrictions during the first 4 EPs and the first album!

The other one I wrote something brand new for, ‘Another Night Done’, came together
on the night – a first for us as we usually write separately. I really just wanted to create something that would make people dance!”

BUY STREAM
FULL EP

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