Today, Tindersticks announced their new studio album Soft Tissue, out on September 13 via City Slang. The album announces with the official video for the album’s opening track, “New World,” the first song written for Soft Tissue and a springboard for the album’s thematic concerns about personal and public worlds knocked off-kilter. The stop motion video, along with the album’s stunning artwork, were created with Stuart Staples’ daughter Sidonie Osborne Staples. Soft Tissue is now available for pre-order on all formats as well as an exclusive limited edition vinyl bundle including a special 7” New World / Falling the Light available from City Slang.
About the new video, Stuart Staples explains: “Sid was making these tiny ceramic characters, so I asked her to make some of the band. Later I wrote this song ‘New World’ about somehow trying make sense of this strange world I felt developing around me and these little guys came back into my mind - Let's take them on a stop motion journey across a strange land, from the barren rocks to the bountiful fruit that is not familiar and maybe poisonous. Sid put the landscapes together and moved the figures, millimeters at a time. Neil Fraser took the photographs, we edited as we went along.”
A tangible sense of mutual curiosity propels the five members of Tindersticks to fresh territory on Soft Tissue, their 14th studio album. Previously, on No Treasure but Hope (2019), these mavens of mood and beauty had embraced a kind of dusky, live-sounding naturalism, followed by the bracingly executed experimental left-turns of 2021’s Distractions. As resilient and flexible as its title suggests, Soft Tissue connects and exceeds those extremes, drawing new life from the contrasts and convergences of its tight, intuitive songs and restless details. Nurtured into being by the band and their collaborators as a kind of open “conversation,” the result is the sound of a band inspired by a fervent shared desire – and capacity – to surprise themselves.
About Soft Tissue, Staples adds: “‘Baby I was falling, but the shit that I was falling through. Thought it was just the world rising.’ These are the opening lines of the album, it seems all the songs on ‘Soft Tissue’ inhabit this confusion somehow - despairing at the destruction, suspecting you are responsible.
Musically, it seemed that since 2016’s 'The Waiting Room', the band's output had been reactionary. The last two tindersticks have been so opposed to each other - 2019’s 'No Treasure But Hope’ was an extremely naturalistic recording process - due in part as a reaction to the previous few years of experimental projects (High Life, Minute Bodies) and in turn as a reaction to this purity 2021’s 'Distractions’ became one of the bands most dense, experimental albums.
It felt like time to stop lurching to these extremes and to find a way to marry the rigor of the songwriting and the joy of the band playing together with a more hard-nosed experimental approach.”
Soft Tissue is the band’s first release of original material following their original soundtrack to Claire Denis’ 2022 film The Stars At Noon, starring Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn and released in the US via A24. Since her 1996 feature Nénette and Boni, Denis (High Life, Beau Travail) has worked in some capacity with Stuart Staples of Tindersticks on the distinctive music in her films.
No Treasure But Hope and Distractions affirmed the band’s readiness to stretch themselves, to live and breathe inside their music. More recently, two 2023 France shows devoted to their hugely varied 10-film work with Denis upheld the band’s adaptable determination to actively pursue ever-bigger challenges. Says Stuart: “It’s about being more demanding, more ambitious, and then coming out the other end of it feeling as though you’ve achieved something.”
On 'Soft Tissue', that ambition takes the form of a fluid, questing take on what Tindersticks can be, anchored by a sense of trust between the bandmates. As Stuart explains, “In this band, I think that there’s so much… I was going to say talent but it’s got nothing to do with talent, really, it’s about that desire, that need to reach for something and to go to places you haven’t been. And I feel that comes from everybody. I didn’t feel as though there was any kind of restriction about, or any dogma about, what this record could be, beyond where it takes us and what excites us.”
Tour Dates:
09.30 – CZ Prague – Hybernia Theatre
10.02 – AT Vienna – Akzent
10.03 – AT Vienna – Akzent
10.04 – AT Vienna – Akzent
10.05 – DE Munich – Prinzregententheater
10.06 – DE Leipzig – Schauspielhaus
10.07 – DE Berlin – Theater des Westens
10.09 – SE Stockholm – Göta Lejon
10.10 – NO Oslo – Centrum Scene
10.11 – DK Gothenburg – Pustervik
10.12 – DK Copenhagen – Konservatoriets Koncertsal
10.13 – DE Hamburg – Kampnagel
10.15 – NL Eindhoven – Muziekgebouw
10.16 – NL Utrecht – Tivoli
10.17 – BE Brussels – Cirque Royale
10.21 – UK Brighton – Dome
10.23 – UK Manchester – New Century
10.24 – UK Bristol – Beacon
10.25 – UK Birmingham – Town Hall
10.27 – UK Glasgow – Pavillion theatre
10.29 – ISL Reykjavik – Háskólabíó
11.02 – GR Athens – Christmas Theatre
11.04 – ES Madrid – Colliseum
11.06 – ES Barcelona – Palau de la Musica
11.08 – PT Covilhã – Teatro Municipal da Covilhã
11.09 – PT Leiria – Teatro José Lúcio Da Silva
11.10 – PT Aveiro – Teatro Aveirense
11.11 – PT Porto – Casa da Música
11.12 – PT Lisbon – Aula Magna
11.15 – FR Biarritz – L’Atabal
11.16 – FR Toulouse – Halle aux Grains
11.17 – FR Lyon – L’Opera
11.18 – FR Annecy - Bonlieu
11.20 – FR Merignac – Le Pin Galant
11.21 – FR La Rochelle – L’Espace Encan
11.23 – FR Cherbourg – Le Trident
11.26 – FR Rouen – L’Opera
11.27 – FR Nantes – Le Lieu Unique
11.28 – FR Nantes – Le Lieu Unique
11.29 – FR Rennes – Le Théâtre National de Bretagne
11.30 – FR Brest – Quartz
2025
03.07 – DK arhus – Musik Huset
03.09 – DE Dortmund – Konzerthaus
03.10 – BE Antwerp – Queen Elisabeth Hall
03.11 – NL Amsterdam – Le Carré
03.12 – FR Paris – Salle Pleyel
03.14 – UK Glasgow – Pavilion Theatre
03.15 – IRL Dublin – 3Olympia
03.17 – UK London – Royal Albert Hall
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