Description
Boston Manor's third full-length GLUE is the sound of a band questioning the state of the world around them. Inevitably, in a critical examination of the modern world, it comes from a dark place, but one that fuelled the five-piece to create a body of work that elevates their craft further than ever before. Its 13 highly charged songs came out of a process that singer Henry Cox describes as "very chaotic", but the result is a truly ferocious album - one that both draws and moves on from what they've done in the past, incorporating the gloomy atmospherics of 2018's Welcome To The Neighbourhood with the highly charged yet melodic punk of 2016's debut Be Nothing.
Yet while GLUE consolidates the different musical avenues Boston Manor have explored since forming in 2013, it's very much an album that represents who they are - and reflects the state of the world - right now in 2020. That, Cox admits, isn't particularly pretty. "It's a lot more abrasive and a weirder record," says Cox. "My parents don't like it as much as the last one, but I don't think they're really our demographic, so I'm not too worried about that. It's just new territory for us. The whole point was to throw away any preconceived notions of what the band is and push ourselves out of our comfort zone."Like Welcome To The Neighbourhood, GLUE was recorded at The Barber Shop studios in New Jersey, but with a very different approach to that record. Produced by Mike Sapone and engineered by Brett Romnes, Cox admits that these are not just the most primal and plain-speaking songs the band - completed by guitarists Mike Cunniff and Ash Wilson, bassist Dan Cunniff and drummer Jordan Pugh - have ever recorded, but everything the previous seven years have been leading up to. "This is the start of our band finally becoming the band that we want to be," he says. "It's taken us so long to get here, but I'm really proud of us for becoming our own thing. Not once did we think about what people wanted to hear - we just went entirely down the rabbit hole with it".
