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Feb 24, 2025 By Andy Von Pip Photography by Giovanna Ferin

Juanita Stein unveils a new video for ‘Old World’ from her most recent album The Weightless Hour. Directed by Orlando Cubitt, the video brings to life one of the album’s most poignant tracks, setting the stage for Stein’s upcoming UK tour, which includes a highly anticipated stop at London’s Lower Third on 25th March.

Following recent tours with Evan Dando and Travis, the Howling Bells frontwoman is carving out her own path once again, bringing her brooding, poetic storytelling to intimate venues across the UK. The Weightless Hour, her fourth solo album, has been met with widespread acclaim, and has again demonstrated Stein’s ability to blend deeply personal narratives with atmospheric, cinematic soundscapes.

Stein describes ‘Old World’ as a song born from a moment of reflection, written in a single breath while staying in a small village in the South of France. She recalls how the experience of walking through the pine forests led her to confront the weight of her own family history:

“This was a song that was written in one long breath, in a room, in a house, in a village in the South of France. After having taken a long walk through the woods, the light streaming through the pine trees, I found myself reflecting on what it means for me, to have ended up living and travelling in Europe, like so many of my family before me.

This song recalls the first time I travelled to Europe, which was with my family when I was 16. Having lived a life in Australia, a country in its infancy by comparison, I was confronted with a rich and bloodied history whose roots ran centuries underground. The generational trauma that came with learning about my own family history there, was a reckoning. We brought along my grandmother, who hadn’t returned to Czechoslovakia since she was 14, when she was forced to flee the Nazis. We visited the crumbling house she grew up in. I stood in the streets of many Jewish ghettos and burnt out synagogues that were forced to become churches. I visited Holocaust Memorial museums, I learned of the slow rise of right-wing fascism reawakening in a new Europe, all of this coupled with the acknowledgement that I had relocated to Europe myself to start a family and the conflict that causes within the body. I learned what it felt like to be the “other”, to be hated for the religion you were born into, and simultaneously, to also be hated for being perceived as a Westerner, as when someone yelled at me, “bloody American” when they looked down at my ripped jeans, or when me and my brothers were hauled into a police station in Prague for potentially spying when using our disposable cameras outside a cemetery. This was not Australia. This was The Old World.”

Juanita Stein Live Dates 2025:

MARCH
Fri 14th - SHEFFIELD, Hallamshire Hotel
Sat 15th - MANCHESTER, Soup
Mon 17th - NEWCASTLE, Cluny 1
Tue 18th - GLASGOW, Nice’n’Sleazy
Wed 19th - EDINBURGH, Sneaky Pete’s
Fri 21st - LEEDS, Headrow House
Sat 22nd - CARDIFF, Clwb Ifor Bach
Mon 24th - BIRMINGHAM, Hare & Hounds
Tue 25th - LONDON, Lower Third
Wed 26th - SOUTHAMPTON, The Joiners
Thu 27th - BRIGHTON, Hope & Ruin

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