Legendary Manchester post-punk act The Durutti Column have announced Renascent, their first new studio album in 16 years. The new record, led once again by the unmistakable guitar work of Vini Reilly, is due this summer via London Records, with Bandcamp currently listing the digital release for July 10 and physical editions shipping around July 31. The album follows 2010’s A Paean to Wilson and arrives after the recent expanded reissue campaign surrounding the band’s Factory Records-era catalog.
Alongside Reilly, Renascent features longtime Durutti Column percussionist Bruce Mitchell and producer/multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart. The album also includes guest vocal turns from a newer generation of artists, including Caoilfhionn Rose on “Agonistes” and Lucas Elliot on the CD and digital bonus track “All They See Is Fire.”
To mark the announcement, The Durutti Column have shared the first single, “Liars,” a graceful return set to a low, downtempo beat with a faint trip-hop sway and a touch of dream-pop atmosphere. Reilly’s smoky, close-miked vocals are counterbalanced by feminine sighs and warm electronic washes, but the center remains that guitar: clean, fluid, and instantly recognizable, with elaborate yet controlled melodic phrases that breathe like poetry. His riffs seem to carry decades of feeling without overplaying a single bar, leaving “Liars” suspended between recollection and motion, tender without becoming fragile, delicate without disappearing. This is unmistakably The Durutti Column: a sound built from restraint, ache, and Reilly’s gift for turning the smallest melodic gesture into an emotional event.
Watch the official visualizer for “Liars” below.
Pre-orders for Renascent are available now on CD, vinyl, cassette, digital, and deluxe formats. The album’s visual presentation also nods back to the group’s Factory lineage, with artwork from longtime Factory design collaborators Mark Holt and Hamish Muir of 8vo.
Listen to “Liars” via Bandcamp below, and pre-order Renascent here.
Formed in Manchester in 1978, The Durutti Column occupies the first page of Factory Records history. Vini Reilly would later describe the group as Tony Wilson’s “baby”: the first act signed up to the Factory club night and the first band signed to Factory Records. They would also appear on A Factory Sample, Factory’s first record release, alongside Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, and John Dowie.
The original lineup soon splintered, leaving Reilly as the project’s center of gravity. His clean, fluid, emotionally exact playing stood apart from the harsher edges of the era. Where many of his contemporaries turned alienation into abrasion, Reilly found tension in delicacy. His music traced quiet lines through jazz, classical phrasing, ambient space, and the private weather of memory, creating a body of work that felt less like a reaction against rock orthodoxy than an escape route from it.
The group’s 1980 debut, The Return of the Durutti Column, recorded with producer Martin Hannett, remains one of the great anomalies of the Factory catalog: a record as hushed and human as its infamous sandpaper sleeve was antagonistic. Inspired by Situationist mischief, the original sleeve was designed to scuff whatever sat beside it on the shelf, with early copies hand-assembled by members of the Factory circle, including Joy Division. It was a typically Factory contradiction: beauty housed in sabotage, gentleness wrapped in damage.
Across the decades that followed, Reilly continued to steer The Durutti Column through a deeply individual body of work, often joined by longtime percussionist Bruce Mitchell and, in more recent years, producer and multi-instrumentalist Keir Stewart. Albums such as LC, Another Setting, Without Mercy, The Guitar and Other Machines, and Vini Reilly moved between instrumental miniatures, chamber-like arrangements, electronic textures, and songs that seemed to arrive from some half-remembered interior place. The Durutti Column never fit comfortably inside post-punk’s usual frame, which is exactly why their work continues to feel so singular.
Reilly’s touch also reached beyond The Durutti Column. In 1988, he played guitar and keyboards on Morrissey’s solo debut Viva Hate, bringing a glassy, mercurial Manchester language to the record. His iconic guitar on “Suedehead” remains one of the song’s defining features: that instantly recognizable opening figure, ringing out with a clarity that helped announce Morrissey’s post-Smiths life while quietly carrying Reilly’s own signature into the charts. Whatever arguments have followed the album’s credits over the years, the sound of Reilly’s guitar on that single is unmistakable.
In recent years, The Durutti Column’s influence has continued to travel in unexpected directions, with younger artists and listeners finding their way into Reilly’s catalog through reissues, rediscovery, and word-of-mouth devotion. The music has always carried that kind of private magnetism: understated, deeply felt, and resistant to easy summary.
With Renascent, The Durutti Column return not as a relic from Manchester’s post-punk mythology, but as a living presence within it: still tender, still strange, still guided by Reilly’s unmistakable hand.
Renascent Tracklist
- Echoes in the Memory
- Your Shadow at Morning
- Time Present and Time Past
- Agonistes
- Liars
- Vapour in a Matchbox
- Your Shadow at Evening
- Sargasso Sea
- Scammer
- For Friends Everywhere
- All They See Is Fire — CD and digital bonus track
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