The Orielles – Wasp
The Orielles have been building toward “Only You Left” single by single since January, and “Wasp” — the last preview before Friday’s release — might be the sharpest of the lot. It’s a heavy, angular thing: Henry Wade’s guitar locked into the kind of drone-heavy riff that’s been in the band’s toolkit since they got hold of a freeze pedal in early 2023, while Sidonie Hand-Halford’s drums hit with that pummelling directness that runs through the album. Esmé Dee Hand-Halford holds the low end and the melody together, which is what she always does, and here the contrast between those two jobs feels especially pronounced.
The lyric is genuinely odd in the best way. It follows a wasp — literally, a wasp — climbing a mountain, and the band use that absurd scale difference to work through questions of faith, purpose, and self. They cite the 1947 film “Black Narcissus” as an influence: that sense of confronting something so vast it destabilises you. The real kicker, in the band’s own words: “ultimately it is nature itself that conditions the wasp to hurt us”. It’s the kind of lyrical inversion — blame and cause looping back into each other — that keeps appearing across “Only You Left”. What caught my ear is how well the music earns the concept. The heaviness isn’t decorative; it actually sounds like something enormous pressing down.
“Wasp” arrives as the fourth and final single before the album drops on March 13th via Heavenly Recordings, following “Tears Are” (W07 — read that piece here) and the double single “You are Eating a Part of Yourself” / “To Undo the World Itself” (W02 — covered here). “Only You Left” was recorded in two locations — Hamburg and Hydra — with producer Joel Anthony Patchett, the band’s long-time collaborator. The contrast between those environments, industrial versus bare island, fed directly into the album’s preoccupation with dualisms: metal versus wood, noise versus space, heaviness versus drift.
The Orielles have been a trio for over fifteen years now — Wade, and the Hand-Halford sisters, Sidonie and Esmé — and “Only You Left” sounds like a band who know exactly what each of them does and are done being cautious about it. It’s why “Wasp” is here: it’s one of the clearest statements on the record of what this band sounds like when they lean in.
Tour Dates Europe:
- 13 March — Manchester, UK — Instore
- 14 March — Leeds, UK — Instore
- 15 March — Sheffield, UK — Instore
- 16 March — Liverpool, UK — Instore
- 17 March — Bristol, UK — Instore
- 18 March — Brighton, UK — Instore
- 19 March — London, UK — Instore
- June 2026 — London, UK — ICA (headline)
