Far And Wide, from the 9th October, The Pineapple Thief will feel more like a rock band than ever.
Still progressive. Still masters of spine-tingling atmosphere. Still attuned to the strange, troubled world around us. And now, a decade and seven albums on from the arrival of Gavin Harrison on drums, and newly signed to InsideOut Records, they’ve captured the chemistry, road miles and bigger stages of the last few years and we’ll be hearing it on the art rocker’s new album.
‘New World Order’, the band’s latest single, certainly indicates that and you can check it out for yourselves by way of the accompanying video, by longtime collaborator George Laycock at Black Tide Productions.
Far And Wide is said to be the sound of a group with dreamlike complexity at their fingertips, channelling it into hard-hitting, incisive songs.
“We realised, for instance, that you don’t need more than two guitar parts at any one time,” founder member, vocalist and guitarist Bruce Soord noted. “You know, ‘why have we got four or five guitars? Why have we got six-part harmonies when there’s only three of us singing?’ We deliberately created those constraints, because we thought, ‘we’re a rock band, there’s five of us on stage, this is what we should be about in the studio.'”
“You do start to imagine what a song would look like on a stage, and sometimes that does influence the arrangement,” drummer Harrison added. “Like, ‘this would be amazing live when we do this, if this section just went into this other thing’, and you can picture it with the lights and the atmosphere on stage.”
We’re told there are vignettes of a society in turmoil across the breadth of the album. Moral courage in the face of adversity too. Personal loss and its ripples. Points that intensify the foundations laid by 2024’s It Leads To This, wherein the band contemplated all that the next generation stood to inherit.
Founded in 1999 by Soord, the progressive art-rockers have long been one of the genre’s most successful and accomplished outfits, releasing 16 studio albums and touring worldwide. The band also features Jon Sykes on bass and Steve Kitch on keyboards.
Far And Wide will be available in several formats, all featuring the striking cover image of an abstract sculpture by the late Michael Schoenholtz, father of Harrison‘s longtime partner Hannah.
The Pineapple Thief will follow the release of Far And Wide with a headline North American tour.
