Record

Description

Tracey Thorns first solo album of entirely original material for seven years. Record will be released on 2nd March 2018 via Unmade Road/Caroline International.

Describing Queen, Tracey says: Its a great opener for the album driven along by Ewan Pearsons unashamedly glittering electro-pop production, drums and bass from Warpaints Stella and Jenny, it features me playing electric guitar for the first time in a while, and singing my heart out.

As ever the personal has often been political in Tracey Thorns work. Nine feminist bangers, Tracey Thorn jokes when asked to describe Record. If this album is in part about freedom and disenthrallment, new single Queen is the opening broadside, all personal fire and desire. Her voice, self-assured and richly-textured, yet confessional and affecting, spits out the lyrics on Record with a fresh compelling drive and remains one of the finest female pop voices of the last four decades.

I think Ive always written songs which chronicle the milestones of a womans life. she says. Different ages and stages, different realities, not often discussed in pop lyrics. If 2010s Love and Its Opposite was my mid-life album full of divorce and hormones then Record represents that sense of liberation that comes in the aftermath, from embarking on a whole new no fucks given phase of life.

On Record, the synth-driven tracks arrive and leave with a punchy sub-three-minute directness. I wanted it to be a record youd listen to in the daytime, Tracey says. On your headphones or on the move. Not necessarily in the evening, or in your bedroom. For all its no-fuss pop brevity, the album rotates around Sister, a dubby nine-minute Compass Point-style disco jam where Tracey is joined again by Warpaints rhythm section and glorious backing vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae.

Across four decades Traceys songs and writing have offered up a clear-eyed womans view of the immediate world around her; from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early-eighties band Marine Girls, through sixteen years as one half of articulate multi-million-selling duo Everything But The Girl to her recent acclaimed memoirs and journalism.