Tindersticks will release a new album, Distractions, in 2021, which will be their first since 2019's No Treasure But Hope. While details are few, they have released the first single, which is a cover of "You'll Have to Scream Louder" by DIY post-punk icons Television Personalities (the original is on TVP's 1984 album The Painted Word).
"Late May, early June, 2020 was a twitchy and angry time for many of us. There was a growing agitation inside of me," says Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples. "I woke on a Saturday morning with no plans but just this fucking Television Personalities song going round in my head, it pushed me into the studio. Four or five hours later I had made the basis of this recording, though I had to wait for windows of opportunity within our confinement to work with the band to bring it to a conclusion."
Stuart continues, "I have loved the TVPs since buying the Bill Grundy EP with its photocopied sleeve on one of my regular after school bus trips to the Virgin record shop in a basement on King Street, Nottingham. Some years later, 1984, I was living around the corner on the 17th floor of Victoria Centre flats, they swayed in the wind. I was working a few days at a local record shop and The Painted Word was released. It became at the soundtrack to that semi-slum, those times. I was 19. To be young in the early 1980’s there was much to be angry about, battles to be fought - Thatcher, racial and gender injustice - and (one of the motivations for this song) nuclear disarmament. Although we may not have thought those battles were ever won, we believed we had helped push things in a different direction, that changes were made. In the Spring of 2020 we were shown painfully that these battles are ongoing."
It's a terrific version of the track which keeps to the spirit of the original but sounds like Tindersticks. Listen to that below.
Tindersticks were set to play their first U.S. shows in over a decade back in March before the pandemic hit.
