Irish alt-rockers THUMPER have confounded convention to release a 10-minute single.
Not to be confused with the similarly-named East Anglian NWOBHMers of yore, this Dublin sextet have chosen intense psych-rocker 'Middle Management' as the lead single from their forthcoming second album Sleeping With The Light On, the follow-up to '22's highly praised Delusions Of Grandeur.
“'Middle Management' is a song that we attempted to write and repeatedly scrapped for years," explains frontman Oisin Furlong Leahy. "The first demo dates back to well before the first album, and there were probably 10 versions since then. During COVID, as we knuckled down with this new body of work, the song re-emerged and we very gradually hammered it into shape, condensing years of ideas into something cohesive.
"The song itself is an outlier on the album," he continues. "Every other song coming in at around the 4 minute mark, 'Middle Management' is a clean 10 minutes long. The vocal hook ‘I thought that I could change, I thought that you could too’ repeated into abstraction as it becomes unclear if the narrator has any intention of changing at all. In addition to the walls of guitars, vocal harmonies and propulsive krautrock drums, the song also features co-producer Rian Trench on synth and piano - the first time a THUMPER song has featured anyone other than the six core members.”
The band are currently lining up dates for the New Year. Dates so far are...
24 Feb – Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
25 Feb – Soho Calling, London
26 Feb – Ambers, Manchester
4 Mar – The Academy, Dublin
Pic by Roisin Murphy