The Zutons share 'Pauline', a brilliant new track taken from their forthcoming album, The Big Decider, out April 26.
‘Pauline’ arrives flanked by breezy sun-kissed melodies and an earworm saxophone riff. Lead singer and guitarist Dave McCabe says: “We went to Palm Springs for a band holiday a few years ago. We had mushrooms and it was one of the best days of my life. I wrote the song a few months later. Pauline was the first song we worked on for the album as a band, so it gave us momentum. I was listening to a lot of Hot Chocolate at the time I wrote it, and I think that shows. It’s been going down great on the tour, it’s already a live favourite in the set, it’s always great to get that feedback from an audience, that’s when you know you’re on to a winner.”
The Big Decider was recorded at Abbey Road Studios with legendary songwriter and producer Nile Rodgers, alongside the band’s original producer Ian Broudie. The multi-platinum selling band released three studio albums between 2004 and 2008, scoring nine UK Top 40 singles including two Top 10s with ‘Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?’ and the all- conquering ‘Valerie’, the latter a triple-platinum hit for Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse.
Listen to ‘Pauline’ by The Zutons on the Liverpool FC Official Playlist on Spotify.
The Big Decider comes into view as an album of stark significance to the band, completed by Dave McCabe (guitar, lead vocals), Abi Harding (saxophone, vocals) and Sean Payne (drums, vocals). Written against the backdrop of a decade and a half’s worth of lived experience, it is born under the weight of family tragedies, lives lost and created, reality checks, and home truths faced up to and stared down.
Wrestled into shape under the kind of steam that only decades-long friendships – with all their messy fall-outs, make-ups, breakdowns and ultimately love – can muster, The Big Decider became the sound of water passing under the bridge, and love for music, love for each other, and love for creating together becoming the most important thing of all.
Long-anticipated, authentically hard-won, scorchingly self-aware and truly worth the wait, The Big Decider is the sound of a band channelling what Abi Harding describes as a lifetime of “great chemistry and great connection”. Or, as Sean Payne puts it: “We had a genuine feeling of a shared vision. In the past we haven’t really said how we feel, or we’ve taken each other the wrong way. But this album was different. We really didn’t feel good until it was just how we wanted it.”
Having sold out their run of intimate live shows set to take place through Jan, Feb and March, tickets for the band’s full UK tour are on general sale now here.
