BREAKING BONES

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For London-bred band BONES UK, every song is a chance to speak their minds, and to shed light on the disconnect between the status quo and the far more glorious world inside their heads. On their self-titled debut album, vocalist Rosie Bones and guitarist Carmen Vandenberg confront everything from the beauty industrial complex to toxic masculinity to music-scene sexism, embedding each track with choruses primed for passionate shouting-along. Out July 12 on Sumerian RecordsBONES UK is an album that’s both provocative and endlessly exhilarating, even in its most outraged moments.

True to the L.A.-based band’s anti-conformist spirit, BONES UK unfolds with an entirely uncontainable sound, a riff-heavy collision of rock-and-roll and rough-edged electronic music. Raw defiance fuels first single “Pretty Waste”, out today. Check out the video HERE.

“Pretty Waste” is a dizzying anti-anthem driven by blistering beats and Rosie’s haunting vocal delivery.

“Pretty Waste is about this notion that if you’re attractive you can’t be clever. Or if you’re sexy you can’t be smart,” Rosie says. “As people we are judged so much for what we look like and people have opinions of what we can or can’t be because of it. It’s about being judged for what you look like and saying fuck that. What you look like on the outside doesn’t have to define who you are on the inside. It’s about not trying to live up to what people expect/want you to be because of your appearance, age, sex, race. You can be whatever you want to be. None of that shit should ever define you or be put on you by other people. It’s unimportant.”

Impressively, BONES UK create their own music videos. Rosie explains the concept behind “Pretty Waste”.

“BONES UK is a band made of two people with very distinct personalities that are linked by the music we make. With the video for ‘Pretty Waste’ I just wanted to find a way to showcase our different vibes and me and Carmen having our own box to play in was just a simple way of doing that.

We then interact with each other between the split screen (breaking it and playing with it) showing that we are linked and operating as one unit. Stuff like me inhaling a cig and Carmen blowing out the smoke gives this feeling of us being this one entity…and that entity is BONES UK.

This was really put to the test when we had to do the ‘catching the cigarette’ in the mouth trick….which took a lot of concentration and about 40 takes.”

“Pretty Waste” also features in the ANNA (2019) movie trailer, which surpassed nearly 1 million views in the first 24 hours.

Pre-Order BONES UK here: http://smarturl.it/bonesuk

BONES UK Track List
1 – Beautiful Is Boring
2 – Filthy Freaks
3 – Pretty Waste
4 – Leach
5 – I’m Afraid of Americans
6 – Souls
7 – Skeletone
8 – Choke
9 – Creature
10 – Black Blood
11 – Limbs
12 – Girls Can’t Play Guitar

Growing up in Italy, Carmen began playing violin at age five, but soon felt compelled to take up guitar. “My dad played me a VHS of Woodstock, and when I saw Jimi Hendrix I just went, That’s what I wanna do,” she recalls. Classically trained in guitar from age six, she later ventured into blues and rock, eventually crossing paths with Rosie after playing a 2014 gig at a blues bar in Camden. “I went up to her afterward and we drank several bottles of whiskey, and we pretty much started playing together right away,” says Rosie. Born and raised in London, Rosie had gotten her start as a drummer but switched to guitar as a tool for her songwriting. “It’s always been all about the lyrics for me—using songs to tell stories and paint a picture, in a way that actually says something about the world,” she notes. Rosie also designs all the artwork for BONES UK, with the band working together to create each of their outrageously cinematic videos.

After recruiting Filippo (a former classmate of Carmen’s at The Academy of Contemporary Music in Surrey), BONES UK began pushing toward the complexity that now defines their music. “We all come from such different backgrounds, and BONES UK is the amalgamation of that,” says Carmen. “When we realized what we could create together, it was like we didn’t have a choice—we had to just keep going.” Moving to L.A. in 2017, the band made their name as an explosive live act, soon taking the stage at major festivals like Lollapalooza and touring with bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Highly Suspect and The Cult, and receiving press accolades from NYLON, Consequence of Sound, Chicago Tribune, REVOLVER and Premier Guitar, to name a few.

BONES UK approaches their live set as the ideal medium for their ever-expanding message, a vehicle for both catharsis and transformation. The band will declare this message all summer long, first by joining an all-star lineup for the Strange 80’s Charity Fundraiser at The Fonda Theater, performing alongside Gavin Rossdale from Bush, Jesse Hughes from Eagles of Death Metal, Atlas Genius + members of No Doubt, Jane’s Addiction, Velvet Revolver and Weezer. They then roll into the Mad Decent Festival at Gillette Stadium in July and onto the newly announce dates with The Struts.

“Music is the most powerful platform you could possibly have, because it has the potential to move people in so many ways,” says Rosie. “We feel like we have a duty to use our platform to talk about the things we care about, and hopefully end up empowering and inspiring people, and help give them the confidence to be who they really are.”

A full list of tour dates can be found below with more to be added.

BONES UK – Tour Dates
Jun 01 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda (Strange 80s 3D)
Jun 10 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo
Jul 21 – Foxborough, MA @ Gillette Stadium (Mad Decent Festival)
Jul 25 – Buffalo, NY @ Canalside*
Jul 26 – Utica, NY @ Saranac Brewery*
Jul 27 – New York, NY @ Rooftop Concert Series at Pier 17*
Jul 28 – Mt Pocono, PA @ Mount Airy Casino Resort*
Jul 30 – Boston, MA @ House of Blues*
Aug 03 – Auburn, WA @ Pain In The Grass 2019
Aug 04 – Hampton, NH @ Hampton Beach Casino*
Aug 06 – Dewey Beach, DE @ Bottle & Cork*
Aug 07 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club*

* w/ The Struts

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