[PREORDER] Echo & The Bunnymen - Apples For Isaac [Indie Exclusive]

Twelve years is a long time to leave an audience waiting. Since 2014's Meteorites, the Bunnymen have spent their nights playing the classics to crowds on both sides of the Atlantic, with a detour through 2018's The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon to revisit their own formative material. Apples For Isaac is the real answer to all of it: eleven newly written songs, the band's thirteenth studio album, and the first proof in over a decade that the well is nowhere close to dry.

Opener "Take Me By The Hand" lands with the urgency of the earliest records, and lead single "Brussels Is Haunted" swells into the kind of chorus that only a band with this much history behind them can pull off without irony. McCulloch produced the album himself and shares the mix with Alan Moulder and Andrea Wright, and the result keeps Will Sergeant's guitar as strange and silvered as ever while leaving that voice all the room it needs. Bold and vulnerable in equal measure, which has always been the trick.

Ten of the eleven tracks feature Clem Burke on drums. The Blondie great and longtime friend of Mac was central to the record and died before it was finished. The band's dedication ends simply: "love you Clem X." It gives the album a weight nobody planned for, and you cannot hear it any other way now.

This green splatter pressing is the independent retail exclusive, out September 18 on BMG. Limited to indie shops only, which is to say: here, and not much longer.