One True Pairing, aka former Wild Beasts songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Tom Fleming, releases new single 'A Landlord’s Death' alongside details of his new album.
Tom’s second solo album, Endless Rain is due out October 25 via Domino. Recorded in Dublin in 2022 with producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, black midi, caroline) at Dublin’s Hellfire studios, Endless Rain boldly restates Fleming’s vision with an autumnal, searching and often uplifting record shaped by the backgrounds in traditional music, classical and noise rock of its players. Fleming’s long term collaborator Josh Taylor-Moon arranged, engineered and played on the record, as well as features by Lankum’s Cormac MacDiamarda and Percolator’s Eleanor Mylor.
Sonically, Endless Rain is an ambitious and widescreen record quite unlike anything in Fleming’s back catalogue. The album includes previously released acclaimed singles ‘Frozen Food Centre’, ‘Mid-Life Crisis’ and ‘Be Strong’.
The announcement arrives today alongside new single ‘A Landlord’s Death’. Featuring a wonderful arpeggio from MacDiamarda on the fiddle, ‘A Landlord’s Death’ rises to a thrilling, and sonically wildly adventurous, climax. “Parasites the f**king lot. No tears shed for the guilty. We’re coming,” says Tom.
Listen to ‘A Landlord’s Death’ on our Blackburn Rovers Fan playlist.
Directed by Michael Julings (Blue Bendy), the video for ‘A Landlord’s Death’ depicts a gorging man in the midst of an indulgent, glutinous frenzy. Of the video, Tom comments: “We see our hero at a table full of his heart’s desires. He gobbles it down greedily, never stopping to think why he is there nor where his greed might lead him. He just can’t help himself can he?”
It was Christmas in Cumbria, and at the end of 2019 that Fleming felt that he had ran out of road. “It was off the back of a lot of personal difficulties,” he reflects, “a loss of income, a loss of house, everything. It rained solidly for about a week.” Fleming reflected on his life and watched the downpour. “The brown, mucky water rising and the creatures that live in it.”
Today, Fleming’s reflection and hard-won self-revelation has fed into Endless Rain – the startlingly intimate and gorgeously realised new album from One True Pairing.
“I didn’t write anything for ages and then it all happened at once,” says Fleming of the remarkable burst of creativity that first led to Endless Rain, “that hasn’t happened before. “Frozen Food Centre” has possibly been in my head for about seven years and I couldn’t find a way to get it out. But “Be Strong”, “Tunnelling”, they were fifteen minute jobs.” What came out was in turn tender, reflective and autobiographical. Fleming still seems bewildered about how it all came out, and where from. ‘Frozen Food Centre’ in particular, clocking in at seven minutes, is a poignant small-town vignette about childhood, where home is a place to escape and there are ghosts in the aisles of supermarkets.
Other album highlights include ‘Human Frailty’, a gorgeously tender song of acceptance and ‘Prince of Darkness’, which is something close to a dour northern lullaby.
Fleming’s output has always looked at ideas around masculinity – the sad and sexy music of Wild Beasts subverting accepted roles around young Northern men. Now older and wiser, Endless Rain uses that base to explore new territory, stepping back, looking deeper and using newfound experience to create something else entirely.
