“It's about finding inner strength to fight in immensely hard times. To call on our ancestors when going up against the impossible.” On the evidence of new single Platinum, Penelope Trappes' forthcoming record A Requiem could be one of the albums of 2025

Brighton-based Australian vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Penelope Trappes has shared the video for second single from her forthcoming record A Requiem, and as with the video for lead-off single Sleep, it's dark and unsettling viewing.

“It started with an idea of sitting completely still while a dancer spirit gracefully but chaotically moves all around me,” says Trappes. “All of the elements of my album are in this video. Mourning of the growing distance between family, homeland, mortality awareness, and the inevitability of death. It's about waking from a long spell - finding inner strength for the quest for empathy and love. Patterns of the past, present and future all evolving at once into new forms of synchronicity.”

Posting on Instagram she adds, “Platinum - the chemical symbol is “Pt”… it’s pliable but not brittle; a silver and precious transition metal - one of the rarer elements in the earth.

“Platinum is about finding inner strength to fight in immensely hard times. To call on our ancestors when going up against the impossible. The need to trust the stars and the moon and the transitions within our lives, when everything feels like a battleground.

“I wrote this in Scotland. Slow. Alone.”

Watch the video below:

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A Requiem, set for release on April 4 via One Little Independent Records, is described as a musical service in honour of the dead, featuring “incantations of dreams and nightmares, of death and grief, as well as power and autonomy.”

“I was looking for an equilibrium between a ‘heaven' and a ‘hell” says Trappes, “screaming out to the wisdom of our foremothers - surfacing and leading me into true strength and beauty. I listened to the sorrow closely. Death is a part of our reality. Inevitable. Omnipresent. But nightmares can be beautiful.”

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.