T.R. Burge & The Temple return with “This Bird Is Flown,” alongside the announcement of their debut album, “Godache” which is set to release November 6th.
The song was born close to home, inside Burge’s own flat in “Little Ireland,” a corner of central Manchester steeped in a strange, layered history, one that even brushes up against the early stirrings of the Russian Revolution. Its lyrics trace back to a single dream image, later filtered through a period of heavy reading into esoteric ideas, which crept into the finished imagery almost without invitation.
“The lyrics relate to a dream I had in which a woman was standing on the edge of a promenade of some kind, looking out at the ocean,” Burge said. “She looked as if she was mourning the loss of something. Someone who had left. It was a very vivid and emotionally charged image. The rest of the imagery in the song then built around this. When recording this song at Klangbild studios in Berlin, Pete, our drummer, Liam, our mate/technician, and I had the best day ever, drinking some beers and listening to Martin J. Fiedler and Aninka create, play and overlay the violin parts. It was heaven. I’ll never forget hearing that in the moment come to life.”
Violinist Aninka Rosa had been pushing for more contrast in the band’s writing, and Burge built the track around that idea directly, letting tension rise and drain away across a series of distinct movements rather than holding one mood throughout.
Recording, mixing and production took place, as much of the band’s work does, at Klangbild Studios in Berlin, under longtime collaborator Martin J. Fiedler.
Three years went into the debut album, but its roots stretch back much further — close to a decade of Burge moving between Manchester and Berlin, the latter absorbed slowly while playing in an entirely separate Manchester project on the side. Fiedler entered the picture almost by chance: a familiar face sat mysteriously in a Kreuzberg bar, approached one night on a friend’s dare, handed a pair of earphones, and played an early demo. What followed became the backbone of the record.
Those Berlin sessions produced something memorable in their own right. Watching drummer Pete Leaver record was, by those present, described as witnessing something genuinely rare — a musician who falls into a trancelike state, approaching the kit with an emotional delicacy and deep feel unlike anything they’d seen from another drummer.
“It’s as though he is completely immersed within it,” Burge said. “This was a wonderful experience to witness happen in real time.”
Loss runs underneath much of it. Several members of the band were navigating grief of their own during the writing and recording process, and that experience left its mark on Godache’s emotional register throughout. Geography shaped the record as much as anything else. At its core this is a Manchester band, yet Godache took its final shape at Klangbild in Berlin — with one song tracked back home in Manchester first before being carried across to Germany for mixing and production, a deliberate way of keeping both cities inside the same record.
“The record is deep, dark, emotional and will take you into the Abyss,” Burge says, “but we hope also pull the listener out the other side.”
The band itself is T.R Burge on vocals and acoustic guitar, Aninka Rosa on violin and vocals, Pete Leaver on drums, and Frederic Lyenn Jacques on bass and keyboards — the latter bringing over ten years’ experience from Mark Lanegan’s Band. Though only formally established in Manchester in 2024, the project’s real starting point sits eight years earlier, in a chance Berlin meeting that still shapes how the band writes and records today.
Their reference points run through Southern Gothic storytelling, early blues, and the stripped-back emotional honesty of artists like Townes Van Zandt, Mark Lanegan, Crime and the City Solution, and Elliott Smith. What defines the band’s sound most is the exchange between Burge’s vocals and Rosa’s violin — an instrument treated here less as accompaniment and more as a second voice, one that can carry a lyric’s full emotional weight without a single word.
For T.R. Burge, who has been writing and recording as a solo artist for a number of years, this release marks the full realization of a project that has been taking shape, across cities and collaborators, for considerably longer than its 2024 formation date might suggest.
“Godache” will be released on November 6th.
Stream New Single “This Bird Is Flown’ here:
