Von Hertzen Brothers: New Day Rising

The band’s sixth album is their most immediate yet.

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Fifteen years in the making, and New Day Rising, the latest Von Hertzen Brothers album might just be about to make them – in the eyes of an entirely new audience – something of an overnight success.

VOTE FOR NEW DAY RISING IN THE CLASSIC ROCK AWARDS

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On 2013’s Nine Lives, songs like Flowers And Rust and the pulsing Coming Home hinted at the band’s commercial potential outside of their native Finland. New Day Rising – not least in the effervescent title track – hammers the point home assuredly.

Producer Garth Richardson (Biffy Clyro) has given the record a steely lustre and sheen that most listeners will find difficult to resist.

And while the neo-prog leanings of songs like the haunting Separate Forevers (from Nine Lives) are absent here, the expansive, dreamlike Hold Me Up, the whimsical and folky Dreams and the brooding You Don’t Know My Name (which echoes the thrumming Coming Home in tone) are the work of a band at full creative tilt and in the ascendant./o:p

Philip Wilding

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.