Girl Ray, the three-piece comprising Poppy Hankin, Iris McConnell and Sophie Moss, today announce the release of their much anticipated third album, Prestige, on 4th August 2023 via Moshi Moshi. Co-produced by Grammy Award-winning producer, Ben H. Allen (M.I.A, Gnarls Barkley, Christina Aguilera, Deerhunter) along with the band’s singer and songwriter Poppy Hankin, Prestige takes the shambolic charm of their debut, Earl Grey (2017), and the indiefied R&B of 2019’s Girl, and injects it with a booster shot of Hi-NRG eighties disco pop.
Prestige is the sound of Girl Ray reclaiming disco music as the celebration of sexuality and outsider culture it started out as. Inspired by Pose, the television drama about New York City’s queer ballroom scene in the 80s, Prestige is an escape to a fantasy clubland, it’s dancing with your friends, it’s falling in love. In fact, the overarching narrative of Prestige is love: falling in it and being afraid of getting hurt by it; being all alone and longing for it; the tensions between what it is and what you imagined it would be.
The London three-piece today also share their latest single, “Hold Tight”, along with a video directed by their long term collaborator, Alex Cantouris. With the lyrics “Call me when you want to get a coke and sit on the wall”, it feels like a gigantic Wordsworthian declaration of love. Poppy said the following about the track, “Lyrically this songs is about how appreciative I am to have found my partner, and how my mental load feels so much lighter and easier to bear now that I’m with her. The production on this takes some inspiration from Haim’s incredible record ‘Women in Music Pt. III’, and features a subby drum loop inspired by Atlanta’s hip hop scene.”
Speaking of the video, Poppy said “Despite being caught in heavy rain the whole day, falling over in the mud countless times, and Alex constantly holding an umbrella over the camera, this video was so much fun to make, and we will remember it as one of our favourite shoots.”
Director Alex Cantouris explained “To mark the 8th video me and Girl Ray have done together, and to celebrate almost 10 years of working alongside each other, we thought what better way to honour the occasion than to drive seven hours to the Lake District and spend a whole day filming in the rain. Fortunately the rain made the perfect backdrop for us to combine our theme of Bananarama meets 19th century Western aesthetic. Frankly, once cow patterned clothes were mentioned, the video really made itself.”
“Hold Tight” follows the release of “Everybody’s Saying That”, which was inspired by ”the straight-to-the-heart simplicity of the disco greats” and which Clash said “channelled disco abandon and 70s glamour with its sweeping strings, glitzy beat, and Stevie Wonder-esque flourishes.”
Stream “Hold Tight” here and watch the brilliant video below.
