Blackpool’s Boston Manor have announced that their second album, Welcome To The Neighbourhoodwill be released via Pure Noise Records / Sony Music Australia on 7th September, 2018.
PRE-ORDER WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD HERE
Produced by Mike Sapone (Taking Back Sunday, Mayday Parade, Public Enemy), Welcome To The Neighbourhood is a soundtrack to disenfranchisement set in a fictionalised version of the band’s hometown. The first single to be revealed from the album is the ‘Halo’, a song underpinned by a wash of doomy electronics and visualised in the dark vignettes of its accompanying music video. “’Halo’ almost got scrapped & didn’t make the album,” vocalist Henry Cox admits. “It was a totally different song, much slower and moodier. About a month before we went into the studio we reworked it entirely & it morphed into this current incarnation. It’s a song about feeling trapped; being in a vicious cycle & not knowing if there’ll ever be a way out.”
The world that Welcome To The Neighbourhood inhabits is an unapologetically bleak one, a world rife with poverty and drug addiction, boarded up shops and a population unable to escape a predicament they didn’t even know they were in. “My generation financially and culturally barren,” Cox says. “We can’t afford to buy a house, we’re very much paying the price for our parents’ generation’s mistakes, but at the same time too fucking lazy and distracted and comfortable to do anything about it.”
While Cox is also keen to point out that this album is neither politically-motivated nor one taking arms against his parents’ generation – “If anything,” he chuckles, “it’s more of a stab at my generation” – the 12 songs on the album have nevertheless been shaped by the tumultuous state of the world and Cox’s own worries for both its future and the future of his generation. By using the band’s hometown of Blackpool – which is also where, as usual, they wrote all these songs – the band grounds those fears into a physical, tangible location, which also serves as a metaphor for the larger themes and issues that inspired and which dominate these songs. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s,” explains Cox, “Blackpool was this booming town. It was a holiday destination, a place where you can go to forget all your troubles and now things here are just so fucked up – there are huge drug problems and a 40 per cent unemployment rate in the winter. It was once this beautiful thing and it’s become a little bit broken.”