As if a four-day work week needed improvement: Spector has made a triumphant return with new single ‘Catch You On The Way Back In’. The track is accompanied by the news that the cult act’s third studio album Now Or Whenever will be released in October via the band’s own label, Moth Noise.
Self-described by frontman Fred Macpherson as a “160bpm boy voyage”, ‘Catch You On The Way Back In’ is “An “until next time” for when you don’t know how long the next time might be.” Fitting, then, for a world that’s been kept waiting, with music fans hankering to see their favourite acts in the flesh, but not knowing when the shows they had tickets for will be postponed until. The song is an auditory depiction of limbo, a departure lounge where the hopeful and the hopeless sit side-by-side waiting to see what fate has in store for them: “Don’t ask me where I’m going / Like you don’t know where I’ve been / Don’t know how this one ends / But I know how it begins”. Fred adds: “It’s more of a drinking song than a thinking song, so it will probably make most sense when we’re all allowed in the same room again.” When, indeed.
If the exultant offering is anything to go by, Now Or Whenever looks set to match the frenetic energy of the band’s 2012 debut, Enjoy It While It Lasts, rather than the more sombre mood of 2015’s Moth Boys. Fans of the indie-rock outfit have had little in the way of new material to sink their teeth into—contenting themselves with 2020’s Non-Fiction, a compilation of three EPs released from 2017 to 2019—but if ‘Catch You On The Way Back In’ is anything to go by, it will certainly have been worth the wait for a more substantial offering.
Produced in January 2021 at Coastal Sound in Liverpool by Rich Turvey (Blossoms, The Coral), Now Or Whenever is set for release on 1 October and is available to pre-order here.
Words by Beth Kirkbride
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