Spector‘s latest album, Here Come The Early Nights, set for release on Friday 24th November is a mature and introspective meditation on aging and legacy. Addressing the search for purpose and identity amidst urban chaos, the London-based band offers a poignant reflection that ensures their relevance transcends fleeting trends. Rather than risk being relegated to a trivia question in your local pub’s 2010s music quiz, Spector confidently assert their enduring significance in the British indie scene.
The record opens with ‘The Notion’, containing frontman Fred Macpherson’s best lyric to date: “What happens after the afters?”. It prompts the listener to think about the transient nature of euphoric experiences and the emotional whiplash that accompanies the pursuit of mercurial highs. Conjuring images of youngsters spilling out onto pavements after a house party as the sun rises, it also invites a wry smile as you remember how good those parties seemed at the time – but how, in reality, you were cornered in someone you didn’t know’s kitchen by a tedious person whose jaw was in a different postcode. Nostalgia isn’t what it was, indeed.
“It’s a slowing down and an acceptance that excitement and possibility come in many forms, and not just in the way that we assume it will when we’re young, where we want adventure and high-octane, energising things,” said the band’s bespectacled frontman, when we spoke to him about the forthcoming record at Tramlines Festival earlier this year.
Next up, in the Chris Rea-derived ‘Driving Home For Halloween’, the lines “Front row to the latest crash / playing in blood since the pound collapsed”, perfectly encapsulate our generation’s desensitisation to economic turmoil, and are reminiscent of The Strokes’ ability to capture the zeitgeist in their groundbreaking 2001 debut, Is This It. The American outfit’s release even gets a nod in the lines “If this isn’t it / then what did all that matter amount to?” from ‘Another Life’, a song that was co-written with Fyfe (aka Paul Dixon), who opened on Spector’s first ever tour and was in bands with guitarist Jed Cullen as a teenager, and perfectly captures the feeling of meeting an ex’s new partner and pondering alternate life paths.
There’s a sense in which Spector are pondering their own roads travelled, having only become indie cult icons after a tricky start, with ‘Never Have Before’ acknowledging the difficulty in making it as an artist: “Give up on your dreams / it’s harder than it seems”. The swelling intensity of the track, complemented by Dimitri Tikovoi’s tight production and Cullen’s consistently tight musicianship, even mirrors a metaphorical train leaving the station.
‘Not Another Weekend’ features a slippy, staccato start, before referencing Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and it’s hard not to see how a reference to a text all about the pursuit of the American dream could read as a foil for the idea of never quite making it into the big time as a band. The pressure to throw the towel in altogether comes through in a line from the title track, “Feels like the ends in sight”, perhaps reflective of the struggles of balancing life on the road with having a family and being beholden to someone other than yourself.
More pop culture references come through in the often Vaccines-sounding ‘Pressure’, which evokes Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, similarly delving into the philosophical and moral aspects of aging and the passage of time with the lines: “But the Portrait of a young man / lying in the wrong hands / A gallery could tempt me / now the frame is empty”.
Standout track ‘Room With A Different View’ alludes to E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel by a similar name, exploring the conflict between individual desires and societal expectations, emphasising the theme of settling and ‘making do’ with the chorus: “You’ve been paying for a room with a different view / You’ve been praying that it grows on you / You’ve been hoping for a sky with a different hue / You’ve been saying that it’s right for you”. There’s an emergent sense of disappointment, that life isn’t quite as good as you thought it would be when you were young; perhaps that’s unsurprising given it’s nigh on impossible to get on the housing market, all your friends are getting married and having babies while you’re sat in your houseshare doomscrolling, and the planet is quite literally on fire. ‘Some People’ incorporates a quote from The Dark Knight with the refrain of “some people just wanna watch the world burn,” an apparent nod to the band’s love of meme culture (see: their hilarious efforts to promote the new record), while also serving as a flippant acknowledgment of global warming.
Themes of selfishness and visions of bad role models creep in, with the album concluding with ‘All of The World Is Changing’, a jubilant track that references toxic masculinity: “Looking for fathers in every bar fight”. This energetic conclusion contrasts with the album’s more muted array of tracks than we were given with 2022’s Now Or Whenever, promising a captivating live performance.
But then for all the record’s carefully selected pop culture references, title track ‘Here Come The Early Nights’ serves as the album’s centerpiece, exploring the idea of making peace with aging and rejecting what’s popular. As Macpherson sings, “Irrelevant feels so right,” the band has ironically made an album that is more relevant than ever before.
Words by Beth Kirkbride
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