Credit: Colm Henry

Irish avant-garde Post-Punk band Virgin Prunes have announced a reissue of their album A New Form Of Beauty. This follows the reissue of their Colin Newman produced album If I Die, I Die, which arrived in early 2023.

A New Form of Beauty will be released via BMG on March 8th, 2024 on 3LP and 2CD, alongside a media and artbook, new sleeve notes, remastered audio, and new remixes from the band’s frontman Gavin Friday, and Apparition.

To mark the announcement of the reissue, the band have shared a remix of “Sweethome Under White Clouds” by Apparition and Gavin Friday.

The album’s themes range “from mournful tales of unrequited love, frustrated sexuality, morbid eroticism and wasted youth, to yearnings for distant dreamlands”.

Singer and songwriter Gavin Friday’s career has spanned four decades and has seen him collaborate with his childhood friends in U2 (The Edge’s brother, Dik Evans was also in Virgin Prunes), as well as The Fall, Sinead O’Connor, Dave Ball, Scott Walker, Hal Willner, and Quincy Jones, and he has also create music for Academy Award nominated films such as In the Name of the Father and In America.

The Virgin Prunes’ A New Form of Beauty (1981) was recorded and produced by the band itself. It includes the tracks of the first four parts of what was a five-part, mixed-format project with Rough Trade Records. Part 1 was a 7” record, Part 2 was a 10”, Part 3 was a 12”: these were recorded between July and October 1981. Part 4 was ‘Din Glorious’, released as an audio cassette, was a recording of extracts of a live event on 8th November 1981 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. Part 5 and 6 was to be a film of ‘Performance, Exhibition, Event’ staged at the Douglas Hyde Gallery on 7th and 8th November 1981.