When Boston Manor were in the studio working on their new album GLUE, they had three words written on a whiteboard to sum up exactly what they were aiming for in the process: ‘Write cool shit.’
“The one rule that we had was to not think about the bigger picture,” says frontman Henry Cox of their follow-up to 2018’s explosive Welcome To The Neighbourhood, due out on May 1 via Pure Noise Records. “And we didn’t even think about how we were going to do it live, either. It was just, ‘Write cool music, and figure out how to channel that into everything else later on.’”
It’s an approach that has worked wonders for the Blackpool quintet, taking the band – completed by guitarists Mike Cunniff and Ash Wilson, bassist Dan Cunniff and drummer Jordan Pugh – even further away from their melodic beginnings and into genuinely colossal territories. “A really noisy rock record” is how the vocalist describes album number three, but he’s modestly underselling what’s to come. You can listen for yourself in the video for lead single Everything Is Ordinary below – but in the meantime, allow Henry to unveil an album that sounds like a career highlight from one of the UK’s most exciting bands…
What was your headspace coming out of the cycle for Welcome To The Neighbourhood, Henry?
“We were really burned out! It was an amazing couple of years in our lives, and it took us to a place that we never expected to get to. But we just toured so much, and in 18 months we didn’t really come home. Then we found ourselves with the summer off to finish this record, and we were in a pretty dark place. We were burned out from touring, and there were some personal struggles away from the band. We all found ourselves a little bit beaten and battered. We were overthinking everything, and it got us to the point where we were on the verge of breaking up or going on a long hiatus to figure out what to do. And then we just had a couple of songs that came out, and they were really angry, raw and visceral, and we came out of the cage fighting. It gave us the kick up the arse that we needed; it was a desperate time, so we wrote an angry, desperate record. We channelled all of that frustration and sadness that we were all dealing with into the music, and it came out great.”
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When did you start writing GLUE?
“The Welcome To The Neighbourhood cycle only really ended a couple of months ago, so we were writing throughout that, on and off. And there were a few different projects that we were going to do, because we weren’t sure if we were going to do a record, or just an EP. But we got to the point where we had this really cohesive body of work – in fact, we’ve actually got two albums (laughs), and one of them is just chilling at the moment! I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. But we had two finished bodies of work, and they’re really cohesive lyrically, artistically and musically. And GLUE just fit together so perfectly that we couldn’t not release it. It felt a bit wrong to split it up and drip-feed it as something else.”