MONIQUE BARRY – “NEW EYES (LIVE)”
INDEPENDENT
Monique Barry continues to celebrate the one-year anniversary of her album HAAK with the live video release of “New Eyes”.
Back in March, Monique Barry conducted a live video shoot of three songs from HAAK, with the plan to release them one by one to celebrate the album’s one-year anniversary. The first video, “Gone+Eagles”, was released in July.
Barry’s concept for HAAK (an acronym for High as A Kite) which she began in 2016, was to embody the passage from idealism to experience in real time by releasing a series of singles as she wrote them, and ordering them in the same way on the final album. Admittedly, she did not expect the project to take seven years. And yet the emotional journey is all the richer and more profound because of it.
Barry and producer-director Michael Wojewoda created live performances of three of the songs from HAAK with the intention of capturing the album’s lavish and ethereal qualities both sonically and visually.
“New Eyes” adds its own narrative to the album’s ongoing exploration of the journey from innocence into experience—in this case, a long, struggling moment where “where joy and pain peacefully unite.” We’re given a glimpse of a world recently discovered and seen with new emotional jeopardy and excitement. Pure love leads to pure pain—and where pleasure is absolute, so is the accompanying suffering.
Rich with rhythm, entrancing flourishes, and ominous emotional signals, “New Eyes” is Monique’s riveting take on Krautrock. Like a dance of love ripping through a burning building, the single is ambient but aggressive, experimental yet traditional. Riding on a rhythm that throbs, smacks, and strums all at the same time, “New Eyes” combines the pounding nocturnal attack of Marianne Faithfull’s time-honoured ‘Broken English’ with the wide-eyed curiosity and bravado of a contemporary Lene Lovich. As spidery hooks creep in, cloudy fuzztone dynamism gathers and mushrooms, and Monique’s searching vocals reach through the music, catching shards of her soul, and ours too. Monique Barry takes the disco-punk dynamic by the throat and hurls it into a dance club inferno.
The musical odyssey of “New Eyes” is accomplished with the expertise of Alisdair Jones on bass guitar, Michael Wojewoda on drums, Dean Drouillard on guitar, Emma Campbell on vocals and Monique Barry on piano and vocals.
The extraordinary mood in the video is created by lighting designer Jym ‘Bubba’ Campbell and Projections and VFX by Craig Small.
Monique has forged a style that marries the everyday to the otherworldly, resulting in musical dreamscapes teeming with innovations, oddities, emotional echoes, and the many stops and starts along the human journey.
For more information, please visit mobarrymusic.com.
ARTIST QUOTE
“HAAK is not simply something that one listens to, it is something to be experienced. To hear it is to get a glimpse into the mind of Monique Barry, and how her life experiences and observations – from the mundane to the extraordinary – are reflected in her art. This album is an auditory treat that you need to hear” ~Bryan Williston, Spill Magazine
Monique Barry
HAAK
(Independent)
Release Date: June 20, 2025
Artist Links
SPILL VIDEO PREMIERE: MONIQUE BARRY – “COYOTE”
SPILL VIDEO PREMIERE: MONIQUE BARRY – “GONE + EAGLES”
SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: MONIQUE BARRY – HAAK
