The Blinders make their return today with ‘Brakelights’, the first track to be taken from their forthcoming third album, Beholder - out March 1 2024 via Funhouse Recordings/EMI.
The perfect introduction to their new album ‘Brakelights’ drips with a dark atmospheric intensity which equally lurks across the album’s other nine tracks. The Doncaster via Manchester four piece’s previous albums were championed by the likes of 6Music and Radio 1 and the last couple of years have seen them make appearances at the Glastonbury and Benicassim festivals amongst others and play sold-out shows, including one at the Manchester Academy in their adopted home-town where they packed in almost 3000 fans.
One of the most exciting live bands out there right now, they recently played two explosive, sold-out low-key warm up shows at the Dublin Castle in London and The White Hotel in Manchester and have announced a run of headline shows in early spring next year. With a visceral urgency live, they take their brooding and intense live show, which recalls the dark atmospherics of The Bad Seeds or peak-period Bunnymen, to the following venues in March.
Listen to ‘Brakelights’ by The Blinders on the Shoot Music New Releases Playlist on Spotify.
The notion of perspective has been at the forefront of The Blinders’ minds of late, vanishing points of the heart and soul giving depth and texture to their Nick Launay and ‘Atom’ Greenspan co-produced third album, the aptly titled, Beholder which follows their politically-charged debut, 2018’s Columbia, and 2020’s seductively sinister Fantasies Of A Stay at Home Psychopath.
“I’d think about what I was seeing in my head listening to the songs. And it was always a character, and I’d describe them as the beholder. That sense of seeing is believing and understanding through what it is you’ve seen. I think the record is about leaving adolescence and becoming an adult, so your experience and your perspective change,” explains singer/guitarist Thomas Haywood.
A record born out of a period of flux within the band; their previous drummer left the group in 2020, Thomas ‘Cass’ Castrey who used to be the band’s tech on the road took over the drum stool full time, while keyboard player Johnny James was also recruited as Haywood and Doncaster school friend and fellow Blinders’ founder, bassist Charlie McGough, realised the interruption in their band’s life opened more possibilities than the doors it closed.
As the line-up solidified – the group were also aided on this album by former Cabbage and Twisted Wheel guitarist Eoghan Clifford – The Blinders engaged in an intense period of demoing as many song ideas as they could fully realise, as they began to forge and understand the new musical relationships that were blossoming within the group. With over 20 songs written at their Manchester base at Brunswick Mill and with Nick Launay and ‘Atom’ Greenspan in place to produce the album in Los Angeles, The Blinders decamped to a stripped-out cottage in rural Wales to drill down and create a final, focused demo that they could take to America as a blueprint of Beholder.
While Beholder shares a frenetic energy with their previous albums there’s a new depth both lyrically and musically to the album. Launay and Greenspan’s astute rock production adds wider atmospheres and sophisticated textures and lyrically the band effortlessly marry angry social observations with a personal desperation which sees Beholder sweep rollercoaster-like through minimal then maximalist twists and turns.
