On their second album The New Life, Belfast four-piece Girls Names move away from the garagey-pop of their debut Dead To Me and delve into post-punk shadowplay. Their Tumblr makes for a pretty good soundboard of their new touchstones: favourites include the bleak, Berlin-born masterpieces of Bowie's Low and Iggy Pop's The Idiot. They haven't done away with the tunes though on this excellent headphones record, and gloom often turns out to be the perfect foil for their deft pop hooks and spacey swooshes.

Back in October, the band released the 8-minute-pushing title track of the record to introduce their new noir landscape which plays with textural darkness and is finds depth in the experimental recesses of audio. On new songs like 'Occultation' and 'The Olympia', computerised oscillations and piston-like pulses rough up the edges of the earworm melodies and washed-out guitars. In terms of a band upping their game, it's a bit like when Deerhunter followed Turn It Up Faggot with Cryptograms. Alongside Dazed Digital's exclusive stream of the record, we caught up with singer Cathal Cully to find out more.

Dazed Digital: Why did you call your album The New Life?
Cathal Cully: The New Life was the name of the newest song and subsequently first single off the record. It just seemed to ring through with everything we were doing. It kind of rolled off the tongue and stuck, it made sense to call it The New Life. I don't know exactly what the new life is yet but hopefully will find out some day soon.

DD: Where was the album recorded, and over what kind of time period?
Cathal Cully: We tracked the bulk of it over a two-week period back in June last year at Start Together Studios here in Belfast. Then I returned sporadically every now and then tweaking mixes and generating new ideas until about the middle of October. Then myself and Ben, who engineered and mixed it, spent a pretty intense week finishing it off.

DD: Since the release of your last album Dead To Me you've added a new member, Phil. How have things changed since he joined the band?
Cathal Cully: We've become a much better live band to listen to and watch, something we were struggling with for a while.

DD: In your song 'Occultation', a bright jangly riff comes in just as the song is beginning to fade out. Do you consciously try to keep a lid on the janglyness?
Cathal Cully: Haha! Yes, I like the idea of that. I think I may want to get rid of guitars all together.

DD: What's your favourite work of visual art?
Cathal Cully: At the minute it's Pyramid of Light (1964) by Heinz Mack, a founding member of Group Zero who were based in Dsseldorf. Group Zero's work and their ideals were a massive influence for me when it came to making this album and naming it, and this piece is on permanent show at the Ulster Museum which is less than a 10 minute walk from my house so it's a lot more tangible to me.

DD: A reviewer once said that he would like to drown to your music. Do you think of your music as dark or morbid?
Cathal Cully: I honestly didn't know that. Poor guy or girl. No it's not morbid at all, though it has dark and nervous sounding tendencies for sure. It does entertain the darker notions of the mind which is only natural, and there's nothing wrong with that. I find it more shocking that people can make happy-sounding music and that no comment is passed about that. Most art as a form of expression is usually down to some sort of need to cathartically expel the ideas locked inside and therefore to create something new. Otherwise you're just in the entertainment business.

DD: You said around the time of your last record that "Dead to Me literally was dead to us by the time it was committed to wax." Did this record feel like an exorcism as well?
Cathal Cully: Totally. Like I said, It was a real cathartic process making this album. There's a lot of weight lifted now it's out there. It was a particularly challenging and draining experience but a great one all the same. I learned so much from it.

DD: Do you think that indie is in a good place at the moment?
Cathal Cully: No. 'indie' music and this notion of 'guitar music', that I keep hearing about that's making a resurgence is a terrible notion that needs to be stamped out and eradicated. Independent music however is very healthy with ideas and a lot of talented people and artists. My only fear is that it isn't all getting out there to enough people.

DD: You pressed the album on transparent vinyl. What's the best thing to look at through it?
Cathal Cully: I want to say someone in particular but I haven't had the chance to do that yet so possibly that person.

DD: The title of your song 'Pittura Infamante' is a reference to the Italian Renaissance genre of defamatory painting. Who did you have in mind, and who would you like to paint a defamatory painting of?
Cathal Cully: Since you've asked, It was mainly myself in mind but no one in particular. David Cameron should be made into a 'Pittura Infamante' although he does a good job of it himself by just opening his mouth and being some sort of walking talking idiot buffoon.

DD: Were you sad that the production of MiniDisc players is ceasing?
Cathal Cully: I'm not sad but yeah I had one, still do somewhere. They were great actually at the time - the idea you could have 3 CDs on one disc half the size of your walkman. My A-level years were transformed. When me and Neil started the band I used to record our demos on my MiniDisc player, and bounced down an old 4track because that's all the gear we had and couldn't afford anything else. Come to think of it, the demo we sent to Captured Tracks that basically got them interested in doing our first EP was made in this way.

DD: What's your favourite filter on Instagram?
Cathal Cully: I've never used Instagram but just did a quick Google. Nashville.

DD: What are your Top 5 favourite girls' names?
Cathal Cully: 1. Helen, 2. Ann, 3. Cara, 4. Claire, 5. Anne.

Get The New Life here.

Follow Owen Myers on Twitter here: @Owen_Myers

Rag and Bone always sets the bar for New York cool, and as winter storm Nemo started to have it's way with the city Friday evening, the coolest thing ever was to welcome show goers with hot Sigmund's pretzels, beer and steamy mulled wine. So chill. No, the other kind of chill.

The designers took inspiration from aviation history, creating oversize bomber jackets and military-inspired parkas. To balance the men's fighter pilot uniform on top, mini skirts and skin tight biker shorts fell barely beneath the jacket hems, showing a lot of leg, plus blue ponyskin shoes. "We had to twist it because we didn't want it to be too masculine, that's not really our girl," Marcus Wainwright said. Further feminizing the collection was a palette of dusty blue and hot red-orange, pulled from Pan Am uniforms of the 1950s and 60s. Wainwright and Neville always mention that the Rag and Bone girl is an inspiration herself, and it's clear that their calculations are focused on the feelings of this fantasy woman – she owns the kind of effortless cool Rag & Bone fans aspire to embody. And she can definitely put down a few beers in a mini skirt and parka.

There's intrinsic excitement in seeing the first offerings of young designers, especially when most of them are presenting to a wide audience for the first time. At the Academy of Art University's student show, ten potential future industry influencers presented seven collections, with a number of standout moments that showed promise for and will hopefully catalyze companies we will be watching for years to come.

Chinese-born Yuming Weng looked to the blurred edges in portraits by artist Henrietta Harris as a construction influence in her minimal wool collection. Shades of heather and pewter wool coats and shift dresses stitched with trapunto-eqsue waves occupied that tricky area of appeal where the commercial and editorial overlap.

Hundreds of cell phones were whipped from their pockets when James Thai's custom leather pieces came down the runway, as part of Teresa Field's collection. The young designer created intricate illustrated patterns on white leather using soldering tools, burning images of flora and fauna like a howling wolf that stalked out from backstage on two slender pant legs. Backstage he told me the wolf alone took over a week to create.

Qian Xie's collection closed the show, and the details of the clothes were mesmerizing. The designer was inspired by natural light moving through interior spaces, and she successfully transformed a poetic observation into a luxury collection. Shiny woven hide on tops and jackets looked like sun coming through a lead-lined window, and clear beading in a checkerboard pattern resembled the kind of winter light many New Yorkers will see from inside their homes mid-blizzard today.

Creatures of The Wind's Shane Gabier and Chris Peters, Chicago's finest, are big on the mood and feeling, their story not about one garment but how it all segues together to create a bigger picture. Styled by Dazed & Confused's fashion editor Emma Wyman, enjoy this beauty transformation during prep for the show as a taster, and come back tomorrow for the collection report.

Cult experimental band PVT premiere their stunning fourth new album,Homosapien, in an exclusive full stream on Dazed Digital. Coming three years after 'Church With No Magic', having pivoted from one band name to the next, the Australian outfit have re-arrived with an 11-track record that invokes from the shadows dark electro beats, but whose rhythmic ensemble is, instead, intended to inspire optimism.

As it retains a monophonic tone through its beats, it almost promises certainty through its listening. But in opposition to its name Homosapien, the record is daubed with unearthy-like tones that flit from one sphere to the next, layered with an in-flux of jittery, oscillating vocals from Richard Pike, the possibility of knowing what to expect is taken away again, making for interesting and thought-provoking listening.

Dazed Digital: The titles for your previous albums and track titles for your new record Homosapien are pretty dark. Is that just something you're naturally drawn to?
PVT: Hmm, that's interesting 'cause I don't see Homosapien that way. For me it's a very positive record. It was a positive experience to make and although the songs do contain sadness, it's mainly hope. The title track, the lyric is 'you're the same as me - homosapien'. I think that's a positive message; we're all human, we're all cut from the same cloth. Having said that, yes, our last record was dark - deliberately dark. This one is more... spiritual, I guess. Maybe I am drawn to noir-ish things. But it's always about balance. You need dark to appreciate light, right?

DD: Where did the inspiration for the album first come from / what is it based on?
PVT: The first lyric I wrote was for Evolution, track two on the record. It's about your own personal evolution - 'you can never know the evolution of a heart'. Only you, personally, can know your own history, and how your heart makes its choices. Also, a big inspiration was a documentary I saw by English filmmaker Adam Curtis. He has an amazing style when looking at history. Everything has a butterfly effect, everything is connected. That was the start of the idea. I hope not to sound really nerdy, but there's a famous philosophy book called Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus). I haven't read all of it, it's far too complicated, but it's a world view about the interconnectedness of everything; all philosophies. I then saw the words Homo Sapiens on a poster for a museum, on a trip to Italy of all places. The cradle of civilization. It seemed like the perfect title, to put it into one word Homosapien, seemed to make it more descriptive.

DD: Billed as your most 'accessible' album to date, was this a conscious decision in the production process?
PVT: Good question. It's never a conscious decision to make something 'accessible'. It's a dangerous trap to use words like that when creating. You don't want to spook the muse.But we wanted the album to sound more human, warmer, and definitely calmer. More open than before, not so anxious and twisted and dense. That was conscious. Whether it's accessible or not is really not up to me.

DD: What's next?
PVT: I'm sure we'll do some touring with the record, Europe/UK in April-May. We've already played in the new songs last year, doing some tours with Bloc Party and Gotye - so they're ready to take on the road. Also, I've already started work on new songs. I think the next one will be very different again.