Tor Maries, also known as Billy Nomates, is set to release her third album ‘Metalhorse’ via Invada Records on 16 May, 2025. This is the first Billy Nomates album to be made in a studio with a full band – bassist Mandy Clarke (KT Tunstall, The Go! Team) and drummer Liam Chapman (Rozi Plain, BMX Bandits) – and was recorded shortly after Tor’s dad died following a Parkinson’s diagnosis: ‘So I was going great guns with the album, and then dad died and really put a spanner in the works, which he’d be very pissed off about. Which is why I kept going. It really knocked me, but I was like, right, we’re here against the odds anyway. Let’s just carry on.’

A concept album revolving around a dilapidated fun fair that serves as a metaphor for all of the ups and downs of life, the record begins with the title track. Quite the departure from previous Billy Nomates songs, it has a honky bar-room blues feel as Tor asks: ‘Won’t you come upon my Metalhorse, that’s the way it goes around’. This is swiftly followed by the more familiar sound of ‘Nothing Worth Winning’, a deeply personal piece (‘My best friend is dying’) that comes across as Heartworms jamming with the Postal Service.

Lead single ‘The Test’ is a gothic-tinged piece with a killer bass line and eye-opening lyrics – ‘Hall of mirrors, I do the wall of death. If they can see us, that’s the test’ – while ‘Dark Horse Friend’ features a cameo from The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell (one of Tor’s dad’s heroes). ‘Plans’ opens in stomping B-52s style – and that can only be a good thing – as Tor celebrates the power of romance: ‘Your love is something that I just can’t get enough. The end of the world shall not come between us’. ‘Comedic Timing’ opens with the line ‘I could hold a stage’ and continues in this wistful vein as Tor – or the character she’s playing – laments how ‘Everything that I know isn’t keeping up with me. The world has moved on and I’ve lost my comic timing’ against an emotive Youth Lagoon-esque backing.

There’s a veer into country territory again on the understated tale of mortality m, ‘Strange Gift’ – ‘Death is a strange gift’ – before ‘Moon Explodes’ closes the record with a celebratory flourish, somewhat akin to Fight Like Apes: ‘Even God himself couldn’t fuck me over’.

With its focus on finding joy and hope in a world that piles on the misery – some unavoidable, the rest the result of misplaced anger, confusion and deplorable influence and ‘leadership’ – ‘Metalhorse’ is a record you’ll want to hitch a ride on.