South African indie rock icons The Dirty Skirts have released their new EP Radiant Clouds today, via Just Music. It’s their first new music release since winning the South African Music Award (SAMA) Best Alternative Album of the Year for Lost in the fall, in 2012.

During lockdown 2021, The Dirty Skirts collaborated remotely for the first time. They instantly rediscovered the creative chemistry that inspired the four albums they released between 2005 and 2012. The band recently won a grant from SAMRO’s Music Creation Support Fund to partially fund a recording. They decided to release the new work in a series of EPs. The first of which is Radiant Clouds.

The themes of the album describe a pivotal time of increased polarization, social inequity, climate change, AI, and TikTok, from the perspective of our ordinary day-to-day lives.

The band’s iconic indie rock sound was built on urgent, emotive vocals, searing riff-based guitars, syncopated fuzzy basslines, and a playful combination of electronic and acoustic beats. The Dirty Skirts continue as their original lineup – Jeremy de Tolly on vocals and guitar, David Moffatt on guitar, Maurice Paliaga on bass, and Mark De Menezes on drums.

Vocalist Jeremy de Tolly comments on the EP, “This is the first new music we’ve released for over 10 years, and we’re so happy to be back. The EP sketches both intimate, personal portraits and wide-open landscapes. The music explores some paradoxes… being seemingly hyper-connected via our phones, while feeling increasingly lonely and anxious. If there were a few emotions that pervaded these tracks, they would describe seeming contrasts of frozen, helpless anxiety, bathed in gentle optimism. Being human is not for the faint of heart! The songs speak intimately of fragility, and numbness, but also reach toward courage, beauty, and the little victories that keep us going along the way.”

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