Echo & The Bunnymen, the band we first discovered through post-punk and new wave staples such as ‘The Killing Moon’, ‘The Cutter’, ‘Seven Seas’, and ‘Lips Like Sugar’, return with ‘Apples For Isaac’, their first album of unreleased songs since ‘Meteorites’ (2014), that is, twelve years on.
The Liverpool group have spent years stalling on the album, between the pandemic and Ian McCulloch’s habitual perfectionism, who wanted the lyrics to be, in his own words, ‘cryptically important’. The result is an album recorded with Blondie’s drummer, Clem Burke, who passed away last year, and dedicated to his memory.
The first preview, ‘Brussels Is Haunted’, recaptures the drama and the melancholic epic that made Echo & The Bunnymen one of the most influential bands in 1980s British rock. It’s not going to dethrone ‘The Killing Moon’, but it doesn’t seem to intend to.
