The Futureheads have new Powers on show at festival
The Futureheads return with the first album in seven years at the end of the month. But before then, they’ll be making an appearance on the Castle Stage at Victorious on Sunday.
Powers, their sixth studio album and follow-up to 2012’s a cappella leftturn, Rant, is released on August 30.
The band call it a record that looks ‘at the balance of power in a personal, political and relational sense.’
Having emerged at the start of the '00s amid a burgeoning swarm of guitar bands, the Sunderland quartet, with their spiky, playful sensibilities, stuck out from the off.
Over the following decade The Futureheads – comprised of vocalists and guitarists Barry Hyde and Ross Millard, vocalist and bassist David ‘Jaff ’ Craig and vocalist and drummer Dave Hyde – amassed five critically
acclaimed albums, headlined countless tours and earned an NME Single of the Year accolade for their distinctive cover of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love.
Although the quartet could probably rely on the successes of old to push them through the next couple of festival seasons, that isn't – and hasn't ever – been the point. ‘Obviously it’s an absolute privilege to come back and still have fans and that’s something to cherish,’ Ross says, ‘but I also think we’ve got a bit of a job to do about letting people know that there’s more to this band than you might have thought.’
Barry adds: ‘I love the thing Bowie said about how an artist should be slightly out of their depth because that's when you get the good stuff. Or as David Lynch says: “If you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deep”.’
The album's lead single Jekyll comes with a self-professed ‘monstrous riff for monstrous, preposterous times’, but it's perhaps the stream-of-consciousness, spoken word diatribe of Across the Border that lands the biggest hammer-blow in terms of outraged social commentary. ‘As a band, we were always interested in personal politics and behaviour, but we never spoke about the state of the nation or big picture politics,’ Ross begins, ‘but in the meantime the world’s changed so much and there are things to really kick against. We live in a region that’s somehow or other been tagged as the poster boy for Brexit, and the misinformation and aggression that this referendum has brought out in people has become a really terrifying thing that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. It's a defining moment in British politics that’s impossible to ignore if you’re making art.’ ‘The record we’ve made is a little off kilter and maybe a little more out of step than you might expect from four lads in their 30s. I think it might surprise people,’ smiles Ross.
It’s an absolute privilege to come back and still have fans