“shaping up to be the most exciting British solo artist since PJ Harvey” - Uncut
Billy Nomates, the project of the Bristol-based songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Tor Maries, today announces her new album, Metalhorse, released on 16 May 2025 via Invada Records. (Pre-save Metalhorse here.) The announcement is joined by the new single, “The Test”, which was premiered by Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music and is out now here.
A propulsive heartland rock track, “The Test” is rebellious in nature, driving through Tor’s increasingly powerful vocal line atop a low humming bass and sparking piano interjections. “A heart is an engine” sings Tor, with the track erupting into a chorus dripping with defiance.
The first track written for Metalhorse, “The Test” encapsulates the turmoil of the last 18 months and the bewilderment that Billy Nomates is still going in spite of it all. Maries describes it in almost spiritual terms: “It’s working at something against the odds and feeling like someone’s helping you from the other side, and if they see you that’s the test,” she says. “I really feel that when we're playing it live. Like, with everything that's going on, I can't believe this is surviving.”
The song is accompanied by a visualiser by the album’s creative director Tom Skipp.
Metalhorse is Billy Nomates’ third studio release, following 2023’s critically acclaimed, CACTI, and her self-titled 2020 debut.
Metalhorse is a fuller album, exploring blues, folk and piano-driven arrangements that take Billy Nomates’ stark punk sound in a more pastoral direction. Produced by James Trevascus and recorded at Paco Loco in Seville, Spain, Metalhorse is the first Billy Nomates album to be made in a studio and with a full band. Enlisting bass player Mandy Clarke (KT Tunstall, The Go! Team) and drummer Liam Chapman (Rozi Plain, BMX Bandits), who round out Billy Nomates live, the trio were booked into Paco Loco just three months after the passing of Maries’ dad to Parkinson's. “We were so close and our bond was music,” she says of her relationship with her father. “That was my safety and protection in the world. Even in the care home, as things were getting worse, I’d visit him and he’d ask me what I was doing. I'd show him the new demos, or I'd have been on the radio. It sort of saved everything from being shit, because we had this positive thing to talk about.”
Metalhorse is a concept album revolving around the image of a dilapidated funfair, representing the tumultuousness of life – risk and pleasure, danger and exhilaration. Not wanting to be too prescriptive with the meaning, the world is alluded to through sound rather than described in the lyrics, with the most vivid sensations coming through in the smallest details. “To me, Metalhorse is this crumbling fairground where some rides are nice to get on and some rides aren't,” Maries explains. “That's how life felt for a minute, and it still feels like that a bit now.” To that point, she also recently received an MS diagnosis that will take some adapting to.
Occasionally, the unfair funfair of life will bring you into contact with someone – as on the album track, “Dark Horse Friend”, which features The Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell in a collaboration that came about so serendipitously it can barely be explained. For Maries, whose dad was a massive Stranglers fan and bestowed the same love for them upon her, it was a “genuinely mental” moment.
Metalhorse is a balancing of extremes. Reckoning with loss, material insecurity, and trying to stay true to yourself against an increasingly unpredictable backdrop of global chaos, the scales could easily have tipped towards darkness, but the more Maries has had to weather, the more precious those smaller moments of happiness have become. Metalhorse begs the listener to find their own funfair. It might not be the loss of someone significant, or trying to find a foothold in an industry in crisis, but there will always be things that feel perilous. At the same time, you have to marvel at the lights while they’re still on. Dancing with those feelings of uncertainty and joy, Metalhorse is awash with both pain and perseverance. “Those Leonard Cohen days might be ahead of me,” she laughs, “but for now there has to be some hope, even if it's not real. You have to tell someone that it's going to be alright.”
Billy Nomates will be playing a series of album release week instores in support of Metalhorse as well as live dates in March and April including festival headline shows at Ritual Union in Bristol and Cro Cro Land in Croydon. Full tour dates are as follows (tickets here):
Live shows:
6 March: Les Inrocks Festival, Paris, France - solo
29 March: Ritual Union Festival headline, Bristol, UK - full band
5 April: Cro Cro Land Festival headline, Croydon, London, UK - solo
Instores:
18 May: Rough Trade, Nottingham, UK
19 May: Rough Trade East, London, UK
20 May: Resident, Brighton, UK
22 May: Just Dropped In, Coventry, UK
Metalhorse
Formats:
Ltd Edition Blue Galaxy vinyl (UK Indies exclusive x 1500)
Ltd Edition Silver vinyl (x 2500)
Ltd Edition *SIGNED* Neon Pink vinyl (x 500, Invada Records exclusive)
CD
DIGITAL
Tracklisting:
Metalhorse
Nothing Worth Winning
The Test
Override
Dark Horse Friend feat. Hugh Cornwell
Life’s Unfair
Plans
Gas
Comedic Timing
Strange Gift
Moon Explodes
