It has been 46 years since Liverpool lads Echo & The Bunnymen started making theatrically bummed-out psychedelic goth-pop anthems, and they aren't done quite yet. For half a decade, Echo & The Bunnymen have been talking up a new studio album, their first record of new material since 2014's Meteorites. (They also dropped a collection of re-recordings called The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon in 2018, but that's not what we're talking about here.) Now, they're finally ready to announce the impending arrival of that album, which is called Apples For Isaac.
According to a new MOJO feature, the Bunnymen started work on Apples For Isaac shortly after the release of The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon, but various factors kept getting in the way of its release. Frontman Ian McCulloch says, “I think COVID had something to do with it. But also I just wanted, lyrically, for everything to make sense — or to be cryptically important. Which is a hell of a sentence." Honestly, "cryptically important" is a pretty good description of the entire Bunnymen aesthetic.
Echo & The Bunnymen started work on Apples For Isaac at Liverpool's Parr Street Studios, which shut down in 2020, before really getting going at Henley's Doghouse Studio, where they lived while working on the LP. Clem Burke, the legendary Blondie drummer who passed away last year, plays on nearly every song, and the record is dedicated to him. Lead single "Brussels Is Haunted" probably isn't going to replace "The Cutter" or "Seven Seas" in anyone's Bunnymen pantheon, but it's great to hear this band's old grandeur back in effect. They've been playing it live for years. Here's what McCulloch tellso MOJO about that song:
That started years ago. [Brussels] was a magical place, the first place the band played abroad in 1980. We got invited over by the hip set of Brussels. A friend of ours, Bert Bertrand, he’s in the opening line. He used to follow us around, him and Annik Honoré. He ended up committing suicide in New York. That still haunts me, and obviously Annik Honoré and the Ian Curtis thing… There’s a sense of, like, total beauty, an ancient kind of sadness, and impending doom, maybe… And Brussels as the center of European politics. All of this stuff is packed into that one song, and it’s weird the way it all tied together.
Below, check out "Brussels Is Haunted" and the Apples For Isaac tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Take Me By The Hand"
02 "Can’t Be Sold"
03 "Brussels Is Haunted"
04 "I’ll Be Your Sunshine"
05 "Hijacked"
06 "The Honey"
07 "An Unstoppable Force"
08 "The Light That Surrounds You"
09 "Lab Rats Ran"
10 "Asimov"
11 "We Prayed In The Dark"
Apples For Isaac is out 9/18 on BMG.
