‘BASED ON YOUR ACTIVITY’ PEARLY GATES ANNOUNCES DEBUT EP, OUT 19TH NOVEMBER 2026

Pearly Gates is the electronic solo project of Newcastle’s Tom Hunt. With a sound that sits between live performance and ambient electronic soundscapes, he gradually dissipates atmospheric textures across the dancefloor, creating sets that immerse any room into a shared sense of transcendent release. For fans of Kelly Lee Owens, Tame Impala, Harry Styles, and The 1975, Tom is quickly establishing himself as one of the North East’s most exciting emerging acts.

Supported by BBC Introducing and BBC Radio 6 Music, Pearly Gates’ single ‘META’ was named BBC Introducing Track of the Week, added to The Line of Best Fit’s New Music Discovery playlist and Rough Trade’s Counter Culture playlist. A second single, ‘CURATED’, followed in October 2026.

‘BASED ON YOUR ACTIVITY’ is a debut EP born from two years of writing that never quite cohered until it did — in one sitting, after watching a documentary about how the modern world learned to simulate meaning. Across four tracks, the project moves through overstimulation and emotional disconnection, identity as performance, loneliness disguised as self-awareness, political exhaustion, and the quiet ache of trying to reconnect with something human. The title sounds like a notification. That’s the point. An algorithm that thinks it knows you. A world that has learned to anticipate your desires without ever really understanding them.

THE STORY

‘I’d been writing for two years, and the tracks felt fragmented – like they belonged together but I couldn’t find the spine connecting them. Then one evening I watched Adam Curtis’ ‘HyperNormalisation’, a documentary about manufactured narratives, modern overstimulation, and the way reality itself can start to feel increasingly synthetic. Something clicked into place. I went straight to writing ‘CURATED’ that same night, and suddenly I could see what the whole EP was actually about. The title ‘BASED ON YOUR ACTIVITY’ came from that same feeling — that phrase you see on every platform, every feed, every recommendation engine. It sounds invasive and passive at the same time. Like an algorithm pretending to know you. The EP sits with that discomfort. Emotional burnout, the performance of self-awareness, the way everything feels temporary. But underneath all of that, there’s something that wants to reconnect. That’s what the closer is for.’ (Tom)

Pearly Gates is just getting started. Following a run of shows including Freight Island Newcastle, The Georgian Theatre Stockton, The Globe Newcastle, Twisterella Festival in Middlesbrough alongside Walt Disco, and Side Quest Festival, ‘BASED ON YOUR ACTIVITY’ arrives as the project’s most fully realised statement yet.