Album Review: Fragile World

Following the critically acclaimed Asphodels in 2025, The Veils return barely a year later with Fragile World, signaling a clear shift in tone and energy.

There’s a clear line connecting Fragile World to what came before, but it moves with a different energy. Again recorded live to tape in Aotearoa with Paddy Hill engineering and Tom Healy producing, Andrews says: “We went into the studio with a lot of songs, but very little idea of the arrangements or instrumentation. It was truly exciting having no idea what this record would sound like and only a few weeks to figure it out. It’s mostly Tom (Healy – Tiny Ruins, The Chills, Folk Bitch Trio) and I playing everything, with Joseph McCallum coming in at times (for drums, etc.). It was all very instinctual, quite full-on, and scary at times – but a good kind of scary, not scary like the real world out there.”

If Asphodels was Andrews turned inward – all quiet and bone, a kind of reverence – then Fragile World feels like what comes after the silence breaks. Not a severing, but a loosening; not escape, but expansion. Andrews has said this new work was a kind of atonement, as though Asphodels sank so deep into itself that something louder, wilder, more alive had to come next.

Where Asphodels was tightly contained, this one arrives loose and half‑formed, finding its shape over a few charged weeks. At the centre is the near-symbiotic exchange between Andrews and Healy – “mostly Tom and I playing everything” meant a shared creative language that seeps into the music. The result is instinctive and restless, trading restraint for something more immediate and alive.

And then there are the tapes themselves – quietly accumulating history. At Roundhead, Andrews has said they “just use the same tapes,” meaning The Veils have now layered four albums onto the same reels, with fragments of earlier recordings seeping into the new. It’s a detail that feels unmistakably Veils: the medium turning spectral.

So for this release, that matters: the album doesn’t just echo Asphodels in mood – it literally carries its residue. Andrews has talked about hearing “old versions of myself bleeding through like a ghost,” moments where earlier selves flicker faintly beneath the surface. Before a single lyric lands, there’s already a sense of something lingering – a quiet haunting woven into the tape.

The title comes from the gospel-tinged Little White Bird (Fragile World) – “I see you in the night / You call when you like / Oh, little white bird / You’d save the fragile world / You’re clinging to life You’re singing so high / I’d make you my wife / But you’re married to the sky / Oh little white bird / You’d save the fragile world” – a song stripped back to something almost nursery‑rhyme simple, shaped in the studio on instinct, where echoes of Nina Simone seem to drift into Arthur Russell in a strange, graceful convergence. It begins delicately with Andrews alone at the piano, but slowly gathers weight, with Tom Healy layering in synths, guitars, and texture until it swells into something fuller and more insistent. Threaded through it – and much of the album – are Healy’s persistent sonic-scapes, undercutting the beauty with tension and unease, recalling the subtle alchemy Warren Ellis brings to his work with Nick Cave.

That said, these recordings are not significantly different from the last album, principally around Finn’s piano and voice. But there are some exceptions. On the upcoming tour, those quieter moments will likely blossom into a fuller bouquet as other musicians add their own nuances and flourishes. We saw this work particularly well at WOMAD last year when NZTrio accompanied the core band. For now, though, they’ll remain simpler, relying on the purity of the instruments and voice to carry them.

The opening track, Aurora, is pure poetry, in that way that you can apply any situation to the lines and get the desired understanding: “And I lose a little time / And I gain a little back / Trying to make it up for some / Of every part of it I lack.”

Finn’s fondness for poetry once again manifests in these lyrical modern-day sonnets. Aurora was written in a single moment – Andrews shaping it as it was being recorded, inspired by a geomagnetic storm that lit up the Aotearoa sky. Last year, we travelled to coastlines to see the hemisphere lit up in pinks and vivid greens, the northernmost spectacle displayed on our southernmost skies. It holds onto the same moody atmospheric immersion as Asphodels, but with a raw edge – every drum hit landing heavy, every snare crack left exposed in the air. It feels less constructed than uncovered, as if the song revealed itself in real time.

Lungs, the album’s first single, feels like the moment everything shifts into motion – the clearest expression of Andrews’ idea of atonement. Though its lyrics were written years earlier in London, the song arrives here with renewed physical force: all breath, pulse, and forward momentum, pressing outward rather than retreating inward. Where Asphodels often hovered like a distant murmur, Lungs arrives unsteady, vivid, and forceful, pointing toward a record less interested in quiet reflection than in staying upright while everything around it begins to unravel.

The music follows that same repeating build-up used on many Veils songs. It’s also the closest to the full-band explosion and drama of earlier works. For some, they might pair it with a Florence Welch song. Ultimately, though, it’s a euphoric love song: “You’re not like anyone I’ve met / You’re not like anyone I’ve seen / And if I don’t know you in my days, maybe / Then I’ll see you in my dreams / Oh, oh, oh / There must be somewhere we can go / Somewhere my heart will not succumb / I want to hear it in my voice / I want to feel it in my lungs.”

Carrying on that theme is an equally brilliant number called Are You Awake Tonight?, a rousing call of spirit, heart and mind. If you read the lyrics literally, it’s Andrews that’s lovesick and missing his betrothed. It’s almost Shakespearean: “Staring across this city on a rainy night / Well, I’ve taken on a path that I can’t right / Howling at your window like a wounded dog – Yeah I’m flying high upon the wings of love.” But listen on, perhaps the chance has been missed. “Seems like all my ambition has arrived too late / I left far too much up to the hands of fate / Now I’m singing for my supper as the lions roar / Or just waiting for your light upon my door”. Perhaps there is hope, after all?

The real style departure is New Day. Healy brings in the dawn chorus and the church of seven bells with the rising sun on this quite literal celebration of sparrow fart and the potential to come. Is this positive? Mmmmm. Not sure. “A new day has come / It’s gonna sweep me off my feet / A little glimmer in the eye / Of every Devil I meet.”

What’s changed is the structure of the song. No piano. Instead, shimmering guitars, heavy drums (they remind me of New Order for some reason), sparkling keyboards and bell tones, and the outro becomes a swirling song cycle. This one is very different.

The Widening Dark uses the undercurrent of a church organ to provide an evangelical tone, while Healy’s nagging drone distorts into a back-loop break that brings forward the Springsteen-styled My Foolish Heart. With its rolling chorus and bridge it’s instantly connectable. If ever there was a concert singalong, this will be it.

More layers of drone and synths open These Are The Days, elevating and darkening Andrews’ electric piano. They also give the song a bit of an 80’s flavour. I kept thinking that Vince Clarke (Erasure/Yazoo) was somehow involved.

With Celtic hints (like Knofler’s Going Home), In This Heart has all the flavour of a classic folk song. That’s because it is, sort of. It’s actually a Sinéad O’Connor cover. Andrews keeps it true and honest – possibly a nod back to his own folk leniency on Asphodels.

For all its looseness and live-wire instinct, Fragile World never feels slight – it is an album haunted by memory yet driven by motion, finding new force in the space between reverie and rupture. If Asphodels lingered like a whisper, this record steps forward with bruised conviction, proving Finn Andrews (and The Veils) can still turn fragility itself into something strangely defiant.

I think Andrews is possibly a bit underrated in Aotearoa. As a songwriter he should stand alongside the Finns and the Dobbyns, and I can’t understand the stubborn stupidity of commercial radio to ignore him. He deserves better airplay time. I’m very much looking forward to seeing these songs and those of previous albums get a fresh airing on the stage during their upcoming 10 date tour. Do yourself a real favour and get along. What better way to nourish your soul.