The Boo Radleys fall headlong into their 34th year with a new single, the title track from their forthcoming, long-awaited seventh album, Keep On With Falling. Introducing yet more harmony-rich, gently fuzzed-up alt-pop, as if the long story of the Boos had gone uninterrupted by their twenty-plus year hiatus, their latest big-chorus track holds a steady course en-route to the long-player’s release on Fri 11 March 2022.
Still feeling the warmth of the words and gestures of thousands of fans that returned to sing and dance through their six-date UK Tour in October 2021, the band with three top-twenty albums to their name, including 1995’s Number One hit, Wake Up! jumps, rejuvenated, into a hopeful New Year.
A choir of three that sounds like three hundred, the full extent of The Boo Radleys’ experience and experimentation with DIY recording techniques can be heard on the expansive Keep On With Falling as lead singer and songwriter, Simon ‘Sice’ Rowbottom’s voice is enveloped in an accompanying vocal cascade. A warm blanket of instrumentation woven of distorted six-strings, fleeting Chic-inspired scratch guitar, crystalline synth notes arcing from verse to chorus and percussive R’n’B piano means, in true Boo Radleys style, no one listen will ever be the same.
Sice says of the track: “Lyrically, it’s an entreaty to myself and everyone else to not be afraid to fail. Some of the most important learning in my life has been gained through massive mistakes and failures. Very little of true worth is learned through success. We learn to walk by falling over.”
Bassist, vocalist and fellow Boos songwriter, Tim Brown, adds: “Sice’s early demos had the feel of Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner’s Electronic, with some of those elements remaining all the way to the final version. Rob (Cieka) brought the drive to the drums and sped it up, Sice added a metric ton of backing vocals to give us a big chorus and there’s that touch of Nile Rogers-inspired funky axe.”
