Late Stay Ultra Girls, the new project from Bristol multi-instrumentalist Tim Burden, opens its account with the debut single ‘Like Washing Sieves’, out April 24th.

A track that doesn’t bother easing its way in and instead drops you straight into a dense, slightly unsteady mix of barrel-house piano, motorik feel, and blown-out guitar that keeps shifting under your feet. Burden has spent the last decade moving through other people’s bands, from The Hideaways to the orbit of Billy Driscoll, Taynee Lord, and the theatrical Doreen Doreen

The track was recorded with Stew Jackson, whose long association with Massive Attack shows up less as a signature sound and more as a kind of patience for darker textures, letting things build into a wall that feels heavy without turning muddy, especially once that feedbacking guitar kicks in early and refuses to leave, sitting there like a live wire running through everything else.

Burden explains: “There’s a real scuzz to the record which I love. Stew’s worked with Massive Attack for decades so it’s not exactly surprising that he’s got an ear for the darker textural side of things, but I fell in love with how he sculpted the whole track into this huge wall of noise. There’s a feedbacking guitar that starts about a minute in and doesn’t stop until the end, which has no right to sound as good as Stew managed to make it.” Continuing to talk about the track, Burden says: “I wrote the music to the chorus of Sieves when I was 15 years old on an out of tune piano that a family friend stole from Portishead Nautical School (now defunct) and delivered unannounced to my bemused parents. 15 years later I wrote the line ‘like a homeless hermit crab in a soup can bedding down, it seems you’ve got a rotten case of falling in love’. 6 months later I finished writing the song, 2 years later I recorded it and now here we are.

The song’s a hot mess to be honest. I think it’s about craving love and hating the idea of needing love. I think it’s about thinking love is really stupid and yet also being furious that you don’t get to be stupid with everyone else. There’s a girl in there I think, when is there not? Or maybe it’s just about crabs. I like crabs.”

‘Like Washing Sieves’ is the first in a run of singles planned through 2026.

Headline photo: @charlesjdean

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