Ride reveal their first material in 20 years
Ride have revealed the first two tracks from their – as yet untitled – forthcoming album. ‘Charm Assault’ and ‘Home Is A Feeling’ is their first new material in 20 years. Produced by DJ, producer and remixer Erol Alkan, the album is scheduled for release this summer and will be released through Wichita Recordings. It was mixed by Alan Moulder who worked on their seminal 1990 album Nowhere and produced its follow up Going Blank Again.
Andy Bell says: “’Charm Assault’ is a pretty straightforward expression of frustration and disgust at the people who currently run our country. The tour in 2015 was a good way of reminding us what we were good at in the first place and ‘Charm Assault’ feels like a natural continuation from our peak. When we started writing together again we tried to imagine we’d kept on making music all this time, and this was just the latest one.”
Mark Gardener says: “‘Home Is A Feeling’ to me is like a slow, wide-screen, sonically, layered, slowed motion warm wash. Like returning home as dawn rises totally exhausted and spangled after a long ..long …big, great night out’”
Andy Bell says: “Out of all the new songs ‘Home Is A Feeling’ comes closest to the early Ride sound. We felt comfortable going vintage on this tune because the album we are making has a pretty broad sonic scope. It’s a short and sweet, melodic tune, with stacked harmonies, reverbed-out guitars, slowed down drums, and a huge distorted bass sound. Erol put his sage-scented electronic wizards hat on to sample up some of our harmonies and make them into a synthesiser preset, which we ended up using on this and some of the other tunes too. We wanted this song to sound jet lagged, so everything on it was recorded with varispeed, either faster or slower than real time. It’s like 1966 Beatles meets 1988 MBV… in other words, Ride.”
The band also announced that they will be playing the opening night of the BBC 6music Festival at Glasgow’s Barrowland on 24th March. Ride also play the following live shows:
Tue 21st March Limelight, Belfast
Wed 22nd March Olympia Theatre, Dublin
13th – 16th July Festival Internacional de Benicàssim
