UK neo-soul stalwarts Tindersticks recently unfurled their 14th studio album, Soft Tissue, a glorious work stitched with slow-burning tension and smoldering soul. The announcement comes alongside the band’s long-overdue return to U.S. soil: their first tour across the pond in 16 years, with stops in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and an appearance at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville from March 27-30.
On Soft Tissue, strings shudder, Farfisas explode, horns bellow, rhythms murmur, and Staples’ exquisite baritone drapes itself in intrigue, navigating a landscape equal parts noir and nocturne. A record rich with 70s soul and orchestrated grandeur, it conjures Scott Walker’s stately drama, Gainsbourg’s decadence, and the dusky romance of Lee Hazlewood, Al Green, and Isaac Hayes.
“Musically, it seemed that since 2016’s The Waiting Room, the band’s output had been reactionary,” muses Staples. “The last two Tindersticks have been so opposed to each other – 2019’s No Treasure But Hope was an extremely naturalistic recording process – due in part as a reaction to the previous few years of experimental projects (High Life, Minute Bodies) and in turn, as a reaction to this purity, 2021’s Distractions became one of the bands most dense, experimental albums. It felt like time to stop lurching to these extremes and to find a way to marry the rigor of the songwriting and the joy of the band playing together with a more hard-nosed experimental approach.”
“In this band, I think that there’s so much… I was going to say talent but it’s got nothing to do with talent, really,” he continues. It’s about that desire, that need to reach for something and to go to places you haven’t been. And I feel that comes from everybody. I didn’t feel as though there was any kind of restriction about, or any dogma about, what this record could be, beyond where it takes us and what excites us.”
Last month, the band unveiled the official video for Always A Stranger, a spectral vision conjured by Stuart Staples and captured through the lens of guitarist Neil Fraser. A flickering, green-hazed reverie unfolds: warped perspectives, curling light, a chamber of strings and horns pressed close, breathing as one. The frame feels conjured rather than composed, a whisper from some half-remembered dream, a spell cast in dim glow, a melody summoned from the forest floor and left to linger in the air.
Soft Tissue follows 2022’s score for Claire Denis’s The Stars at Noon, another entry in a near-three-decade collaboration between the director and Stuart Staples. For nearly thirty years, Denis has drawn from Tindersticks’ inimitable atmosphere: sparse, sultry, restless, to shape her films’ worlds.
Soft Tissue is out now via City Slang. Listen to the album below:
Tour Dates:
- 03.12 – FR Paris – Salle Pleyel
- 03.14 – UK Glasgow – Pavilion Theatre
- 03.15 – IRL Dublin – 3Olympia
- 03.17 – UK London – Royal Albert Hall
USA & CANADA
- 03.25 – New York, NY – Sony Hall
- 03.26 – New York, NY – Sony Hall
- 03.27-30 – Knoxville, TN – Big Ears Festival
- 04.01 – Montreal, QC – Outremont Theatre
- 04.02 – Montreal, QC – Outremont Theatre
- 04.04 – Toronto, ON – Queen Elizabeth Theatre
- 04.06 – Los Angeles, CA – Belasco Theatre
- 04.08 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
- 04.10 – Chicago, IL – Athenaeum Center
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