BRITISH SEA POWER Announce ‘Let The Dancers Inherit The Party’

BRITISH SEA POWER Announce 'Let The Dancers Inherit The Party'
Credit: Mayumi Hirata

International treasures British Sea Power release their first new material in four years on March 31st 2017. Melodic, direct and brimming with emotional urgency, it’s an album where rock muscularity joins inseparably with pop immediacy like a crate of the finest sparkling wine exploding inside a Marshall stack. The first track from the album – Bad Bohemian – is an invigorating pulse of modernist rock music that’s you can listen to below.

Across their entire history, British Sea Power have taken a broad and panoramic perspective that’s drawn on historical events while mirroring the ageless wonders of the natural world. Let The Dancers Inherit The Party’s twelve songs cover subject matters ranging from the stars in the night sky to the methodology of media manipulation. Both consistently contemporary and consistent in mood, the album alludes to a world full of chaos and disorder whilst seeking to answer that world with optimism and hope.

British Sea Power guitarist Martin Noble says of the album: “It was made to a background of politicians perfecting the art of unabashed lying, of social-media echo chambers, of click-bait and electronic Tonka Toys to keep us entertained and befuddled. All this can easily make the individual feel futile. But I think we’ve ended up addressing this confusion in an invigorating way, rather than imprisoning the listener in melancholy. Musically, it’s our most direct album and maybe the first one where we maintain a coherent mood from start to finish. Perhaps a little clarity isn’t a bad thing at this point. There wasn’t a plan to create an album with any particular subject matter but we’ve kind of ended up with a case of ’think global, act local’ – an album where individuals are dealing with their domestic and personal lives against a background of uncontrollable international lunacy.”

Recorded in Sussex, London and on the Isle of Skye, it follows the band’s five studio albums for the great Rough Trade Records – a catalogue of releases that saw BSP become the longest continually-signed band in the label’s history. Rough Trade remain a vital part of the BSP story and will continue to do so, but the new album is being licensed from the band’s own Golden Chariot label to Caroline International. The entire recording of the album was funded by the band’s remarkably dedicated audience. Money was raised via a multi-faceted programme with pledges ranging from pre-orders for a limited-edition box-set version of the album to paying £1,500 for a tattoo that gives entry to all future BSP shows.

Let The Dancers Inherit The Party follows on from the 2013 album Machineries Of Joy – an album Q praised as “Their best record yet… a triumph of sophisticated rock engineering.” In the four years since that record, the band released two film soundtracks and recorded a third, delivered the theme to BT Sports European Championship, re-issued their classic debut (The Decline of British Sea Power) and the 2015 compilation Sea Of Brass (a kind of best-of-BSP recorded with the UK’s leading brass orchestras). All the while, they have enthralled fans by playing gigs in ever more bizarre and unconventional locations. Let The Dancers Inherit The Party sees the band return to the kind of exhilarating and bright-minded guitar music that has seen them nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and which has drawn praise from David Bowie, Lou Reed and the National Maritime Museum, alongside Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes (Peter Capaldi, Daniel Radcliffe and Benedict Cumberbatch have all declared an interest in the band).

Let The Dancers Inherit The Party‘s sleeve features typography influenced by the German Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, whose work BSP’s two vocalists, Yan and Hamilton Wilkinson, discovered while growing up on the edge of the English Lake District. Schwitters fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ended up living in the Lakes, where examples of his work now reside, including at Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal. BSP have long used Schwitters’ sound-poetry recordings in their live shows and, in 2013, Yan created a Schwitters soundscape for Tate Britain. The Schwitters link hints at BSP’s on going fondness for continental Europe.

Stream Bad Bohemian below:

British Sea Power play a previously announced UK tour in April 2017. The dates are as follows:

Thurs 6th Bristol Trinity
Fri 7th Leeds Church
Sat 8th Newcastle Riverside
Sun 9th Edinburgh Liquid Rooms
Tues 11th Manchester 02 Ritz
Weds 12th London 02 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
Thurs 13th Birmingham 02 Academy 2

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

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