AUTOMATIC FOR THE TANGENT
Auto Reconnaissance is the first time the same line-up have made a second record.
The Tangent launch their 11th studio album on
August 21. Entitled Auto Reconnaissance, it’s the first time the band have had the same line-up for two successive releases. “That’s pretty good about 15 years in, isn’t it?” laughs de facto leader, keyboardist/vocalist/producer Andy Tillison.
“The Tangent started out as a project – we weren’t supposed to be a band,” he continues. “However, slowly but surely, we gradually ended up with people who were becoming more regular.” As such, guitarist and co-producer Luke Machin, bassist Jonas Reingold, saxophonist/flautist Theo Travis and drummer Steve Roberts complete the line-up, as they did for 2018’s Proxy.
Tillison reports that he’s enjoyed having a certain level of stability for the first time in the band’s history, before adding a proviso: “There’s always been a question in my mind – how do you develop when you don’t have any changes in the line-up because you’re not bringing any new blood in? But Rush had that very long lasting line-up and did develop well together. In The Tangent we started off with essentially 10 years of line-up chaos and then started to stabilise. Yes did the opposite!”
He believes Auto Reconnaissance finds the collective at their most diverse. “The album goes from essentially quite accessible and commercial almost pop music at times into some of the darkest stuff we’ve ever done,” he reports.
“It’s got the flavour of some of our most poppy album,
Spark In The Aether, but part of it goes as far into our darkest moment, Le Sacre Du Travail. These two flavours sit side by side.”
Not far shy of two decades since their 2003 debut, The Music That Died Alone, The Tangent remain signed to InsideOut. “This band has never followed a career path,” Tillison says. “We’re not trying to career build. We’re just trying to build a body of work and see what happens next.
“InsideOut have played a huge role in allowing us to do this without any kind of plan or goals. And we’re very grateful to them for letting us do it.
“I hear a lot of people dissing their record labels, but InsideOut have signed me four times, for fuck’s sake! It’s probably not because they like my hairstyle. They must be mad!”
Auto Reconnaissance features sleeve art by Ed Untisky, who last worked with The Tangent on 2014’s A Spark In The Aether. NS
“We’re just trying to build a body of work and see what happens next.”