British indie rock stalwarts The Claim present the band’s first new recordings since 1992, it is The New Industrial Ballads LP and it releases on May 24 via A Turntable Friend Records. The Claim is a diamond band, an indie rock music collective which inspired like a few, bands like Blur, Manic Street Preachers, etc. There are many rock-stars from the glorious Brit ’80s and 90’s era which highly recommend our today’s guests, and often mention the band’s name among their top-inspirations in an always emotional narrative and with honest admiration. These guys were very young at the time when The Claim were starting to appear in the scene in the mid-’80s, at the dawn of the later on established Brit-stormy-indies. That period when post-punk and new wave music were “fortified” trends in the wider pop culture, that period when the generation was already seeing the upcoming fall of Thatcherism (and Reaganism in The US) and they were starting to party about it. The seeds were sown, the “indies” started flourishing, and The Claim were there to plant their effort in the new groundbreaking music style.
The New Industrial Ballads LP comes with 14 brand new and utterly shining songs and it is an album which defines the modern indie sound. An album of 14 tracks is an ambitious release and The Claim sound like they have still a lot to say, as they blend it with a few more amazing elements. There is no English or British equivalent of Americana. If there were, it might sound something like their new record and The Claim would be seen as one of the originators of the genre. This is not simply an English group playing American music. This is a group of musicians making a beautiful and original hybrid that channels the root ingredients of classic English guitar music – a tasteful combination of folk, thoughtful melodic pop, and angular politically-tinged pop into something that is contemporary and original. The first single is Journey, with a very serious reason; The most disturbing consequence of Brexit has been the way in which economic migrants have been de-humanized by the media and the political right. Journey, is about making a stand against such bigotry and remembering the universal search for new beginnings, belonging and happy endings.
The Claim guitarist Dave Arnold says, “Journey marks a welcome return of political pop. It’s a song that the Claim wrote following the European referendum. It was motivated by a deep unease about the way in which the political right dehumanized economic migrants during the campaign and afterward,” and continues “The lyrics reflect on the similarities between the journeys made by different members of all our families across the generations, to find a new life and a happy ending. Empathy is something we have to fight for.”
The band has pretty serious reasons to appear on the scene again and it looks like they’ll stay for long. The new album was recorded at Jim Riley’s Ranscombe Studios in Rochester, which is the spiritual home of today’s Medway sound with the studio being used by all local luminaries young and old, including Theatre Royal, Billy Childish, Graham Day, Treasures of Mexico and Glenn Prangnell’s Groovy Uncle. This is a must-listen record!
The new album comes hot on the trail of a special reissue of their seminal ‘Boomy Tella’ album, available on green vinyl and also CD for the first time. Both of these albums are releasing via A Turntable Friend Records. The album was remastered for this limited edition of 300 copies, using the original 1/4 inch tapes!!!
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Written by Mike D.
