Jesus And Mary Chain, here's the new single "Chemical Animal" previewing the album "Glasgow Eyes" – Listen online

Jesus And Mary Chain have released “Chemical Animal”, a new single that follows the first taste of the new album shared a few days ago, namely “jamcod“. The upcoming album from the Reid brothers' band, “Glasgow Eyes”, will be released on March 8th via Fuzz Club – Cooking Vinyl. Jim and William Reid will further celebrate their 40th year of activity in 2024 with an autobiography (published by Orion/White Rabbit) and a celebratory tour taking in the UK and Europe, also stopping in Italy on April 17th at the Alcatraz in Milan. “Glasgow Eyes” was recorded at Mogwai's Mogwai studio, Castle of Doom, in Glasgow, where Jim and William had also worked on the previous album, “Damage And Joy” (2017), the British band's reunion record after several years apart. Below is the audio stream of “Chemical Animal”.

“Chemical Animal” is a track with autobiographical overtones, as Jim Reid explained: “'jamcod', the first single from the new record, was about that night in 1998 at the House of Blues, when the band split up. The theme of 'Chemical Animal' is different but there's still a connection: I was thinking back in particular to those dark days of chemical dependency. When you fall that deep into that hole it's instinctive, and the drugs are the driving force. It was a horrible way to live and I'm grateful I no longer live that way. One effect is that it made me aware of how our brain, who we are, how we feel and what we do, depends on our neural chemistry, a chemistry beyond our control. It's a biological curse we can't escape.

“Don't expect Mary Chain to go jazz,” Jim Reid himself writes instead about the new album. “People should expect a Jesus and Mary Chain record, and that's certainly what 'Glasgow Eyes' is. Our creative approach is the same as it was in 1984, you just come into the studio and see what happens. We went in with plenty of songs and let them take their course. There are no rules, it's a kind of telepathy, we're those strange twins who finish each other's sentences.

The creation of the quarrelsome Reid brothers – William (guitar) and Jim (vocals) – is a perfect example of how a simple, almost trivial intuition can radically change things in music, especially during a period when the new British "independent" rock in all its forms (goth/dark, electro-wave, and melancholic, melodic pop-rock in the Smiths mould) was stagnating in its own stereotypes, incapable of any substantial leap forward (aside from the magic woven by 4AD, but that was a musical universe unto itself), or worse was dangerously drifting toward fashionable sounds (synth-pop), often with disappointing results: what's certain is that no one seemed capable of reigniting the fury and fervour of punk, which by then was unanimously regarded as prematurely dead and buried.

But when in October 1984 four unknown Scottish kids released their first single, “Upside Down”, many thought a miraculous reawakening of the Sex Pistols' sacred fire seemed possible. And indeed nothing about them betrayed that impression: incendiary live shows, a cocky and arrogant attitude (with statements not far from today's "gallagher-esque" refrain of "we're the best rock band ever") and, last but not least, a "natural" talent for gratuitous, mocking provocation (suffice it to mention just the band's name, but also lyrics that were hardly for schoolchildren, indeed in some cases bordering on the explicit).

In short, the fearsome Reid brothers, and no less their two bandmates, bassist Douglas Hart and perpetually drunk drummer Bobbie Gillespie (the very same who would shortly afterwards launch the fortunate venture of Primal Scream), had already laid, with their first singles, the right groundwork to become the standard-bearers of a "new" punk, one that could combine the genre's basic rules (fast, deliberately rough-hewn songs built on no more than three chords) with both the suffocating atmospheres of dark-wave and an undeniable melodic gift. But what set the band apart from the very start was the noise: William Reid's guitar sounded distorted beyond belief (though not actually far removed from the blasts that, on the other side of the ocean, characterized the new hardcore of Husker Du and Minutemen). A formula that paved the way for the shoegaze movement, which favours dark settings, hushed melodies and dense layers of feedback.

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