Placebo are back, and finally releasing a new album. We’ve got the single Beautiful James below, but what we want to zoom in on here is how the album was created, because it’s different. In a chat with 6 Music, Brian explained the album was finished before the pandemic and delayed, but the writing was done ‘backwards’.
He means this: “I have what I would describe as a boredom problem… Stefan has often said that he’s never met anyone with a lower boredom threshold than myself – and that really influences and informs the way that we work.”
So: “This time I came to Stefan with images first. I wanted to do everything backwards, so I said: ‘Let’s choose an album cover before we write any music, here’s a list of song titles which I’ve been writing over the past five years, let’s start with these song titles rather than starting with the music – let’s do everything that we do backwards. Let’s do this whole album without a drummer…’
In the end, we ended up using two drummers. Of course this backwards way of working kind of floated away as the process started, but it very much informed this break from the process and the way we would normally approach everything. I needed to do it backwards at the beginning to feel like I was doing something different.”
The single is classic Placebo:
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