Credit: Press

The Clientele announce new album and release ‘Blue Over Blue’

Tue 25 April 2023 9:33, UK

The Clientele - 'Blue Over Blue'

2023 has been the year of many welcome musical surprises already, and today another was added to the list with the return of The Clientele. The London indie-pop trio have announced their seventh studio album, I Am Not There Anymore, their first since 2017’s Music for the Age of Miracles, which arrives on July 28th via Merge. The band has also released the gloriously wonky ‘Blue Over Blue’ to heighten the excitement for the forthcoming record.

Comprised of vocalist/guitarist Alasdair MacLean, bassist James Hornsey, and drummer Mark Keen, the band have blended their heady form of guitar-oriented indie with pastoral-sounding 1960s-esque psychedelia to create an aural delight that embeds itself into the soul more intensely with each listen. Whether it be the hypnotic and sunlit main riff, the appropriate warmth of MacLean’s vocal delivery, or the brief psychedelic burst in the middle, there’s a lot contained within the track that clocks in at only 3:16.

“We’d always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkey’s years,” MacLean states in the press release. “None of those things had been able to find their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.” Given this statement and the depth of ‘Blue Over Blue’, it seems The Clientele might be about to release their most multi-faceted album yet.

Whilst the song evokes images of wandering stoned in a park on a hot day, it was inspired by MacLean’s fraught experience of being lost in the woods with his son in Autumn, something totally at odds with the track’s essence. However, the playful angle of the psychedelia hints that childhood might have had something to do with the creative process. This is the kind of subtlety that the trio have always excelled at.

The frontman explains: “‘Blue Over Blue’ is about getting lost in the woods on Hampstead Heath on an autumn day with my two-year-old son on my shoulders – he loved it and wanted to play hide and seek. I knew he was a ticking time bomb as I had no food with me and was trying to find my way back to a path.”

Whilst we eagerly await I Am Not There Anymore, sit back and enjoy the aural delight of ‘Blue Over Blue’. Find the tracklist of The Clientele’s new album below.