About

Private Cathedral are a transatlantic art-pop band dreamed up by multi-instrumentalists Wendy Spitzer and Genevieve Dawson. From North Carolina (USA) and Scotland (UK), respectively, Wendy and Genevieve draw on baroque pop, art-rock, and chamber music to produce a sound that’s both musically disruptive and emotionally exposed.

Both women studied classical composition, but restless for something more visceral, Wendy turned to playing bass and oboe in synth and noise bands in the ‘00’s indie scene of Chapel Hill, NC, while Genevieve sang in jazz ensembles across Europe. Eventually their paths converged in the supportive and creative nest of Goldsmiths College in southeast London, UK in 2015. It was there they began what would become a years-long friendship and intricate collaboration. Rather than relying on their own particular specialisms, both women co-write and co-edit all music and all lyrics, forging a creative mind-meld that’s at once borderless and unbothered by convention.

When Wendy returned to the US, they continued writing across time zones, propelled by a shared imaginative momentum. What started out as a few exploratory songs for their research projects evolved into a collaboration involving intensive writing trips back and forth across the Atlantic, playing intimate shows in dive bars and churches in both countries to try out the material. In between, there were Zoom calls, long emails chronicling dreams and memories, and documentation of their process—eventually birthing a complex song-world and becoming Private Cathedral.

One grant funding cycle and a pandemic later, they hunkered down at The Fidelitorium, former REM producer Mitch Easter’s legendary NC studio, home to an array of organs, vintage synths, mallet percussion, and a grand piano. The resulting self-titled debut album is an original offering of joyful, fierce, symbolically dense, and musically ambitious songs that take us through the looking glass and home again. Exploring questions of autonomy, apocalypse, death, and self-discovery, Private Cathedral creates music for brainy iconoclasts with big feelings. The album is a show of bravura, a tour de force of fearless friendship, a soundtrack to a mood film that has yet to be made.

For lovers of My Brightest Diamond, Tune-Yards, Cate Le Bon, and Kate Bush.

Contact privatecathedral@gmail.com for press enquiries