London art-rock quartet Legss have returned with “Hyde Park Coroner”, their first new music since last year’s Doomswayers EP, and a showcase for all they can do. Enigmatic vocalist Ned Green gives an overview of the song as “a welterweight, advantageous, snake oil coroner, drunk on yesterday’s sacramental wine, presides over a ghostly whodunnit, fit with harmonic episodes of subterranean love, and a synth line to raise the dead to.”
Unsurprisingly, “Hyde Park Coroner” finds Ned hogging the spotlight as he unloads a hallucinogenic tale like its an enormous weight he’s been carrying around in his imagination. Abstract imagery abounds, starting with him becoming infatuated with someone he meets while swimming in the Serpentine (the lake in London’s beloved Hyde Park). From there, he’s off on a romantic jaunt all around the park, as witnessed through his deranged lens, where he doggedly demands “what’s with all this soil?!”. It’s exhausting just to listen to, and it’s no wonder he ends up on (or under?) the ground with the “the subterranean blues”. Adding swagger and drama to his tale is Legss’ impeccable playing, dextrously shifting with the various shades of the singer’s effusive storytelling, from industrial-adjacent lurches to spacey asides to gallivanting rock outs. It’s quite a thrill ride into poetic mania.
Listen to “Hyde Park Coroner” below or on your preferred platform.
