The last time Belly released an album was their second and final album, King. That was 1995, when I was in my final year of school. Tanya Donnelly and co. called time the following year – and she started a solo career with the brilliant (and criminally underrated) Lovesongs For Underdogs album. I’d fallen for the band with the release of the brilliant ‘Feed The Tree’ single, which was actually a Top 40 hit in Britain, and led their debut album, Star, to be pretty damn successful in the UK.

Anyhow…May 4 will see the release of Dove, the band’s third album. The first track from the album is entitled ‘Shiny One’ which you can watch below.  As well as Tanya Donnelly (guitar, vocals) Belly is Tom Gorman (guitar), Chris Gorman (drums), and Gail Greenwood (bass). They will be playing live in the UK and North America over the next few months – click here for live dates.

Chris Gorman had this to say about the video is a press release:

” I purchased a crow mask from Archie McFee a few years ago for a Halloween party that had an “enchanted forest” theme. I’m a lazy and dull human being [sic] so I just wore the mask and street clothes. In the party photos everyone looked magical and “enchanted” but I looked disturbing and wrong. I always wanted to do something with that.

After moving to a house surrounded by woods I started capitalizing on the space for Belly stuff, like the woodshed photo shoot, or the Hushabye Mountain photo series. When it became clear that we were calling the album DOVE and the suggestion that we produce our own video the masks were my first and only idea. I sent a brief pitch to the band saying “hey guys, what if we shoot a video and we all have bird heads?” The response was overwhelmingly affirmative. I purchased 3 more heads.

Due to scheduling I had to shoot each band member on their own – we used my garage as a studio space and the woods around my home for the ‘critter in the woods’ stuff and tree related b-roll.

I worked very closely with my good friend Jack McKenna as we processed the clips and together we arrived at an Andy Warhol layered silkscreen look that really seemed to match the hallucinogenic vibe and retro groove of the song. I have to give a ton of credit to Jack for pulling it all together.”