Bitter Ruin’s music, high wire and high octane, has always found the sweet spot between intimacy and impact. The duo – Georgia Train (vocals) and Ben Richards (instruments, vocals) – possess a kind of volatile creative chemistry that allowed their records to calm one minute, combust the next. Live, they really were stage animals, presenting their power plays with a theatrical élan. But this, their first album in ten years, sounds exactly like they have been away, and, as a result, is possibly their finest work to date.

Back in 2013, it was an exciting time to be among ‘the Ruined’ (as we devotees are known). The band were playing one brilliantly intense gig after another. Their commitment to a close two-way relationship with their fans – that old-school feeling of mutual support where you could change a band’s fortunes and they could change your life – meant they could crowdfund the cost of making then-new album ‘Waves’, which emerged a year later.

Then… Bitter Ruin all but vanished. From a fan’s point of view, more than anything it was strange – partly, I suspect, because of the gap where new contact, as well as new music, used to be. But surprising? In these straitened, streaming times, musicians are doing well if they can stumble from one release to the next. I can imagine Train and Richards feeling that the summit they’d reached was in fact just the foot of the next mountain. To have put so much effort into ‘Waves’, then face starting again – zero resources, same size venues, no apparent way to ‘break through’ – must have been disarming and disheartening. Artists must grapple with this constantly: creativity, fulfilment and a means of self-expression on one side of the equation; sanity, wellbeing and the means to survive on the other. It’s easy to understand any decision to stop: not giving up, just getting out.

Bitter Ruin moved into the ether, an unquiet ghost of a band, only returning now and again to share a stand-alone song or two. The brilliance of ‘Waves’ remained, undimmed. But clearly, the time apart gave the pair some much-needed distance away from the treadmill of band life. Neither had any intention of leaving music. Richards relocated to Vietnam, for a career in songwriting and production. Train moved into education, coaching students in songcraft and vocal techniques. Then, around the time of the pandemic, she returned to writing and recording, with a stunning series of solo and collaborative releases. (To dive in, somewhat at the deep end, start with her deeply personal 2021 album ‘Needles and Pinches’. Unflinching and unforgettable, the title track in particular reminds the listener that, for music to heal, it still needs to show the wound.)

Then, a couple of labels expressed an interest in Bitter Ruin’s return. This inspired them to reconnect and see where working together again would lead; happily, the rapport was as strong as ever and here we are, with a new album we could never have expected. (A pleasing grace note to the reunion is that they remain resolutely independent, releasing and distributing the record themselves.)

Since reactivating the band, Train and Richards have published some fascinating, candid posts about the hiatus, the thorny feelings and issues involved with going away, then coming back: recommended reading! However, I’ve covered some of the backstory in this piece – partly for anyone learning about Bitter Ruin for the first time, but also because I think the enforced break is a vital element of what makes the new record so great.

For those of us who’ve been, er, ‘Ruined’ for years, ‘Arches & Enemies’ has enough in the way of sonic callbacks – a vocal mannerism here, an echo or effect there – to make us feel cradled, remembered. We’re in the same universe of uninhibited drama and emotional brio: molten rock with a subversive, unfiltered twist. But after a decade widening their experiences and immersing themselves in writing and production activity, the Bitter Ruin 2025 model now feels super-charged, ramped up, crackling with confidence and overflowing with ambition and creative energy.

If I had to focus on a handful of distinctive features of their music, it would be these.

First, the vocals. On a casual listen, Train’s is the dominant, more flamboyant voice: coursing through all kinds of timbres and with a spectacular range that means she’s equally at home at street-level or in the stratosphere. Richards’s voice is lower key – in all senses – but something of a secret weapon, possessing a coiled fury, a more stealthily versatile delivery. Between them they take the lead, harmonise, dovetail around each other in calls and responses, or clone themselves into a massed chorus… sometimes all in the same song. You can hear this in the whisper-to-a-scream tension of the climactic ‘Pain on Me’, Richards vocally stalking Train as the track comes to the boil. Or, in a totally different setting, possibly my favourite on the album, ‘Through the Bricks’ – one of the sparser, more nakedly beautiful songs of the set where seemingly unpredictable vocal flights lock together in deceptively complex, pleasing patterns.

Second, the lyrics, which are frank, forthright and fearless – and part of the reason why I think Bitter Ruin are, in their own way, an extreme band. Death and trauma are not far away, whether in the murder-ballad vibes of ‘Shivers’, the heartbreaking examination of grief in ‘Staying Alive’ or the chilling portrait of abuse in ‘A Man like Him’.

Gathering up these two points into my third, everything about Bitter Ruin’s sound serves to dramatise the storytelling in the lyrics. As powerful as they were (are?) live, with carefully choreographed stage personas, their uncompromising approach to the arrangements is where the real ‘theatre’ lies. It often feels as if any given track burns through three songs’ worth of ideas: the duo switch effortlessly from gliding delicacy to depth-charge heaviness, slow burn to sudden explosion. Take comeback single ‘Criticise’ with its precision stop-start riffing, or the mighty ‘Smoking Gun’, which marries a series of indelible melodies to a relentlessly shifting rhythm and looming wall of layered guitar: four minutes of pure adrenaline.

It’s a genuine thrill to have such an original, exciting band reappear virtually out of nowhere, with an album as accomplished and rewarding as this. 

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You can buy ‘Arches & Enemies’, along with Bitter Ruin’s entire back catalogue, digitally through Bandcamp. The new album is also (as I type) still available on limited edition vinyl. Please support and spread the word.

All the Bitter Ruin press/sleeve photography shown is by Scott Chalmers.