Acclaimed British post-punk outfit THE THE was founded by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Johnson back in 1979 and through various iterations and configurations, Johnson and his collaborators have developed a sound and approach that seems to inhabit its own difficult to define genre: music of long shadows, high hopes, channeled anger, feverish passions and sweetly disturbing poignancy that meshes elements of pop, rock, blues, folk and soul among others while spanning alienated electronics to twisted cinematic soundtracks, guitar tumbling swing to crimson ballads, rants and prayers to diaries and hymns.
Over the course of their 45 year history, Johnson and company have released only five full-length albums of original material, 1983’s Soul Mining, 1986’s Infected, 1989’s Mind Bomb, 1993’s Dusk and 2000’s NakedSelf. Having a long-held reputation for being unpredictable, the band has also tackled covers, such as 1995’s Hanky Panky; film soundtracks, including 2009’s Tony, 2010’s Moonbug, 2014’s Hyena and 2019’s Muscle; art installations, a the Radio Cinéola podcast series; 2017’s moving, 84 minute documentary/multimedia project The Inertia Variations and various book publications including 2018’s Matt Johnson biography Long Shadows, High Hopes: The Life and Times of Matt Johnson & THE THE.
2017’s The Inertia Variations took inspiration from British poet John Tottenham’s 2005 book of the same name — particularly the idea of “brooding, abstraction and evasion” getting in the way of the creative process. The Inertia Variations eventually resulted in not just the documentary, but also the Radio Cinéola Trilogy triple album box set.
At the end of The Inertia Variations documentary, Johnson was filmed performing a new song live in his studio, “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” an elegy to his older brother Andrew Johnson, an artist professionally known as Andy Dog, who died in 2016. “It was not an easy song to write,” he says. “That was the first time I’d sung in many years. I enjoyed it but found it very emotional.”
The experience prompted Johnson to revive THE THE as a live band — and it lead to the sold-out 2018 The Comeback Special world tour. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed the release of the accompanying live film and album until 2021. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic also delayed the intended start of the writing and recording of the acclaimed British outfit’s first album in almost 25 years, Ensoulment. Instead, Johnson and company continued releasing a series of 7 inch singles that began with 2017’s “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” and continued with 2020’s “I WANT 2 B U,” and last year’s “$1 ONE VOTE!”
Slated for a September 6, 2024 release through Cinéola/earMUSIC, the 12-song Ensoulment reportedly contains echoes of the acclaimed outfit’s multifaceted and lengthy musical past while being richly representative of the mercurial band’s here and now.
Ensoulment also continues upon Johnson’s long-held reputation for being unafraid to tackle the inherent emotional complexity of the human condition — in particular, intimacy in an age of alienation; democracy in a post-truth age; empire and vassalage; the seemingly inexorable rise of AI and more. And yet, despite all of this, the album is rooted in a deep-seated hope.
“It’s vital to be hopeful,” Johnson states. “And I hope people get out of the album what we put into it. It was created under very happy circumstances, with a great vibe amongst the band and all the people that worked on it. There was a lot of thought, a lot of work, a lot of love, a lot of laughter!”
The album’s material were further refined in rehearsals, just before a six-day recording session at Bath, UK-based Real World Studios, where Johnson was joined by long-standing band members James Ellen (bass), DC Collard (keys), Earl Harvin (drums) and Barrie Cadogan (lead guitar). The album also marks the return of co-producer and engineer Warne Livesey, who worked with the band on Infected and Mind Bomb. The album also features contributions from Gillian Glover (backing vocals), Terry Edwards (horns), Sonya Cullingford (fiddle) and Danny Cummings (percussion).
Earlier this year, I wrote about the album’s first single, the Johnson and Cadogan co-written “Cognitive Dissident,” a brooding and slinky number that’s anchored around a strutting bass line and features bursts of squiggling, reverb-soaked guitar, Johnson’s breathy speak-sing delivery, sultry cooing from Gillian Glover, atmospheric electronics and skittering percussion paired with as slinky and remarkably catchy hook. Thematically, the song captures the madly topsy-turvy Orwellian nature of modern life — and honestly our current moment — with an uncanny and unsettling attention to detail.
Ensoulment’s second and latest single “Linoleum Smooth To The Stocking Foot” is a brooding and atmospheric track anchored around a discordant interplay between screeching fiddle bursts and mournful horn blasts paired with skittering and fluttering beats, hand-claps, and ethereally cooed backing vocals. The song’s arrangement evokes a narcotic-fueled, flop sweat-induced, fever dream while Johnson’s lyrics touch upon the paranoia of the nascent bio-security state, the unending class war and the re-emergence of fascism and more. Much like its immediate predecessor, “Linoleum Smooth To The Stocking Foot” captures the absurdity, the madness, the anxiety-fueled dread, the hate and fear of our slow-burning, lockstep march to dystopian hellscape.
The song’s lyrics were written from Johnson’s hospital bed, under the influence of morphine while recovering from a life-saving operation. As fate would have it, Johnson’s weeks spent in the hospital had occurred at precisely the moment that COVID-19 had become a crisis, making for an even more surreal ordeal for him — and for everyone else. The discordant interplay between horns and fiddle is redolent of Johnson’s hallucinogenic, feverishly surreal experience, which he tried to emulate by asking the musicians to improvise over the track without hearing the other’s contributions, as he manipulated the sounds in real time.
The new single is unique in the fact that apart from Johnson, who contributes vocals, guitar and bass, it doesn’t feature any of the core band members; however, the track features guest spots from Sonya Cullingford (fiddle), Terry Edwards (horns), Gillian Glover (backing vocals) and handclaps from Danny Cummings (percussion).
The single cover art features a previously unpublished piece of Johnson’s late brother Andrew “Andy Dog” Johnson, who was responsible for the distinctive aesthetic style of THE THE’s releases.
The recently released accompanying video or “Linoleum Smooth To The Stocking Foot” was was directed by Tim Pope with editing, VFX and projections People Like Us/Vicki Bennett and Peter Knight — all of whom are longtime collaborators with Johnson and THE THE. Fittingly, the video also evokes the sensation of a fever dream with Johnson’s face being in and out of focus and in and out of shadow throughout.
