The Backseat Lovers return with ‘Close Your Eyes’ on Polydor
The Backseat Lovers – Close Your Eyes
OUT NOW on Polydor
Waiting to Spill, the new album, released Fri 28 October 2022
Pre-Orders
If their phenomenal, international success was determined by the immediacy of pop hook-laden alt-rock then The Backseat Lovers’ Close Your Eyes, the latest, smouldering track to be lifted from their forthcoming album, Waiting to Spill, reveals a band in pursuit of new, bold territories. Intense, emotional, truth-speaking, creeping in with low-lit intimacy and rolling out on turbulent waves of stormy guitars, the Utah four-piece put everything out there for their still-growing global fanbase to pick up and hold on to. Waiting to Spill emerges on Fri 28 October 2022 on Polydor.
Laying bare their intentions with last month’s release of Growing/Dying, the hotly anticipated follow up to the band’s DIY debut album, When We Were Friends, has been described by singer-songwriter, Joshua Harmon as: “the most difficult thing I’ve ever done” leading listeners to expect a deeply personal document of The Backseat Lovers’ current personal and artistic terrain. Close Your Eyes, with the catalytic lyric “Do you want to be like your father?/The older you get, your head’s getting hotter”, lets the sense of early-adulthood confusion, a predominant album theme, rise and pool on the surface.
After their first album rocket-propelled the band from the smaller stages of Provo and Salt Lake City to Lollapalooza, stadium tours with The Killers and Jack White, plus two, sell out tours of the UK and Ireland inside just 18 months, the band has poured their experience, ambition and curiosity into Waiting to Spill’s fearless writing and recording. Taking to the studio with producer, David Greenbaum (Paul McCartney, Beck, Gorillaz), the range of ‘instrumentation’ available to the band expanded to include speeding cars, toying with tape loops, splicing and speeds plus myriad, sound-warping pedals.
Yet, at the heart of the album, and Close Your Eyes in particular, is the deeper, emotional writing challenges that Harmon and his writing partner and guitarist, Jonas Swanson, had set for themselves, first separately and then together.
Following on from finding his own personal commitment through Close Your Eyes, Harmon says of their ideas coming together: “We were both singing about the same sort of feelings, our relationship with our parents, and our perspectives in that moment of seeing ourselves turning into adults. It was a bit of an affirmation from the universe, realising that these two songs could be the same song. That really sparked what ended up being the entire backbone of the record, which was Jonas and my songwriting partnership and companionship.”
The last that fans saw of The Backseat Lovers in the UK was a run of only the band’s second overseas live dates in spring 2022. The sell-out run included a memorable show for a near-two thousand-strong audience at Electric Brixton, London as well as making a notable debut appearance at Brighton’s Great Escape.
Initially forming in high school and around the music scenes of Salt Lake City and Provo in 2018, Harmon and Swanson are joined in the band by KJ Ward (Bass) and Juice Welch (Drums). Their journey as The Backseat Lovers began with the pure love of songcraft, live performance and DIY-ethics, completing their first EP, Elevator Days, just days prior to graduation from High School.
What soon became a runaway train has rolled on to include 370+ million total worldwide streams, including the Top 20 Alternative hit Kilby Girl which spent five weeks on the U.S. Spotify top songs chart. Their organic spread amongst a community of discerning music lovers quickly led to a run of 60 live dates completely selling out on the band’s first two North American headline tours.
Waiting to Spill is heading fans’ way in digital, 180g vinyl and CD formats. Standard black vinyl will be released alongside a dark green vinyl edition, available only from the band’s online store, while a clear vinyl version will be found at indies only.
The Backseat Lovers will reveal more of what lies in store across Waiting to Spill’s under-wraps track listing in more announcements and music reveals in the coming weeks.
