The buzz, as industry insiders say, has already begun.
Antonella, who was invited to judge the prestigious British MPG Awards in April and who is being interviewed for an upcoming global music documentary series (“I’m not at liberty to reveal details yet!”), will also be featured in the autumn issue of a major US magazine and “may” also be posing for a Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair cover photographer.
“Who knows what will happen,” she says. “I was asked, but it all depends whether I can get to New York later this year!”
In Electronic Sounds magazine, critic Kris Needs called Apex Predators “a riveting stone killer supercharged with searing intensity and fried circuit gumbo that'll barbecue your ham-hocks”, with other critics agreeing that the album is “phenomenal” and “utterly flawless”.
As Needs wrote, “I thought this spirit was dead.”
Over a year in the making, Apex Predators features nine tracks, each, Gavin says, “a universe unto itself”, with two of the songs lasting over five minutes and the electrifying blues-infused goth classic-in-the-making “If I Can’t Have You” clocking in over six minutes.
“Obviously, we weren’t aiming for the Brit charts!” Gavin laughs. “It wasn’t about that at all. Antonella wanted to create a powerful narrative about love and loss. The thing, for her, was to write songs you can listen to, over and over again alone at night, finding more in the music each time you listen - in particular, a sense of being seen and held in your pain.”
MAMA, Apex Predators makes clear, owns the territory between anxiety, depression, and passion, in the process bringing an entirely new depth to the art of lyric-writing.
Bestselling author and music critic John Robb described Antonella’s lyrics as “poetry in motion”, and Radio SW20 presenter Susie Webb was left “utterly, utterly speechless” after playing the album’s opening track “Commercial Road”.
“Breathtaking beautiful lyrics,” Webb says. “Antonella’s an enigma.”
Having turned down Alan McGee's offer to sing with the Jesus & Mary Chain in her late teens (https://www.mixcloud.com/BoogalooRadio/riots-raves-running-a-label-special-guest-antonella-gambotto-burke/), Antonella, bruised by a difficult upbringing, "hid away" for years in her writing. Singing, at that point, was "too threatening" as she feels “possessed” when she sings.
“For most of my life, I’ve lived in my head,” she says, “so ‘coming out’ as an artist, if you will, was difficult. I’m not a natural performer at all. It took me two or so years to be able to sing in front of Gavin – I always hid in the vocal booth. I was terrified.”
"Alan, who remained a mate and who has a truly magical spirit - I'm so grateful for all his kindness - eventually gave me the courage to come out of myself."
For his part, McGee described Antonella in his radio interview with her as "forever suprising".
Equal parts alternative, goth, indie, and blues, Apex Predators was inspired by the “darker energies” of London and Wolverhampton.
“There’s also a little bit of Queensland in there,” says Antonella, who, despite being Italian and part English, was mostly raised in Australia. “The infinity of those hot, dusty roads - that sense of just having lost - well, everything, you know?”
Wanting to capture the experience of “being so hurt that you can barely breathe”, Antonella, who attempted suicide “several times” in her teens and whose brother suicided in 2001 – she wrote unforgettably about her grief in The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (available through Amazon) – not only understands “the dark stupefaction” of depression but how to transcend it.
“In essence, that’s the journey of Apex Predators: from Hell to tenderness,” she says.
Her pain is echoed in the raw, lo-fi semi-acoustic Maya guitar that Gavin - who has only just been awarded another platinum record for his production of The Twang's debut album "Love It When I Feel Like This" - plays with a 1980s Roland cube.
“They go beautifully together,” he says. “I use no pedals or external effects and I just play really hard with heavy strings. I play it hard enough until it shakes and then it sounds just about right. We took the raw intensity of 1940s dustbowl Delta sharecropper vibes, added some classic rock grit, some German laboratory synthesis, and a little ambient, and I had a dub bass underpinning it all.”
The first MAMA gig – the band headlined at their venue for the inaugural Feel the Noise festival - took everyone, particularly Antonella, by surprise. Lauding her as a “majestic and somewhat mystical Scandinavian-looking snow queen”, Louder than War critic Eccie reported that she “melted the mesmerised crowd with her hypnotic and hurricane splitting vocal range”, which a BIMM Music Institute Birmingham professor “likened to that of Robert Plant.”
Antonella shakes her head. “I had no idea what would happen,” she says. “Gavin has played with bands at major festivals the world over – he’s a hugely confident and proficient artist - but this was my very first time, so I was just hoping I wouldn’t implode from fear.”
On June 7, MAMA ft. Antonella joins a furnace of popular bands - among them, Smokin' Eskimo, Supersonic Fuzz Gun and The Jack Fletcher Band - to play at Community, a one-day Wolverhampton Arts Centre festival in aid of The Samaritans; on June 28, MAMA has just announced that they’re supporting the Jonathan Hijr Day Quintet to play at a “steampunk/ goth/ vampyr ball” at the Llanfyllin Workhouse, Wales; this week, they’re off to London for the Ivors, and they're planning to tour Scotland and Ireland in 2026.
Did Antonella think any of this would happen when, in late 2022, she asked the notoriously reclusive Gavin to be in her band?
“I had no idea where any of it would lead,” she says. “All I knew was that my heart was dragging me towards music, I couldn’t tell you why. It still consumes me, every day.”