When you told the band, ‘This is my headspace and this is what I’ve written,’ were they all on board?
“Yeah, they were really up for it! This was actually the first album in a long time – or maybe the only album – that we’ve made where we were all on the same page. That doesn’t take anything away from the other albums, but that is rare to be on the same page, creatively, at the same time. There’s five of us! We all contribute equally, and everything is split five ways, so there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. But straight away everyone was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m all in for this.’ That was awesome, and it made things quite smooth when we were putting the songs together. There were no big roadblocks to overcome.”
The album opener and title-track, Datura (dusk), is so different to previous album GLUE’s explosive first track Everything Is Ordinary. What gives you the most amount of pride about that song?
“I love that intro – it might be my favourite track on the record. I think we realised that a lot of our albums have exploded and have gone all-out straight away, and that’s really cool. I like a lot of albums that do that, and it also reflects what we usually do live. But I wanted to set the tone, because this record is quite a big emotional commitment – it’ll be two albums that will probably end up spanning three-to-four years of our lives, so I wanted to give it the gravitas that I felt it deserved. And the lyrics are a poem that I wrote two years ago in the pandemic, and I had it sitting around for ages and I wanted to do something with it. We had multiple versions of it. There was one version where it was just an acoustic guitar, and it was like a Nirvana vibe, and then there were other versions that were more of a full song. But we had written Floodlights on the square, and we thought it would be such a cool way to go into that, and plant our flag in the sand of this record.”
Equally, you’ve got the likes of Foxglove and Passenger which have your typically massive Boston Manor choruses. How did you strike that balance between those and then the moodier, more soundtrack-esque stuff?
“We’re good at writing those big, energetic songs that everyone can sing along to, and that’s been our bread and butter. If we were to play a show or release a record that was missing those moments, it would be doing a disservice to our fans, I think. But, at the same time, we don’t get out of bed in the morning just to make those songs. We’re a bit older than we were when we first started the band (laughs), and our tastes have changed, and we want to satiate our own artistic self-indulgence, I suppose. We want to have a bit of fun and surprise ourselves. Without sounding arrogant, [the more anthemic songs] come quite naturally to us, and what really excites me is the more unusual songs in our repertoire.”