Jesus And Mary Chain, listen to the new single "jamcod". New album "Glasgow Eyes" coming soon, plus an Italian date in 2024

Just days ahead of their concert at the Regio Teatro di Parma for the Barezzi Festival (November 20), Jesus And Mary Chain have announced the release of their new album, "Glasgow Eyes", due out March 8 on Fuzz Club – Cooking Vinyl. Previewing it is the first single, "jamcod", released today (listen to the track in stream below).

Brothers 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 landing in Italy on April 17 at Alcatraz in Milan.

"Don't expect the Mary Chain to go jazz", writes Jim Reid 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 a lot of songs and let them run their course. There are no rules, it's a kind of telepathy, we're those weird twins who finish each other's sentences.

"Glasgow Eyes" was recorded at Mogwai's studio, Castle of Doom, in Glasgow, where brothers Jim and William had already worked on the previous "Damage And Joy" (2017), the British band's reunion record after several years apart.

The new single "jamcod" marries dark electronics with the unmistakable sound of William Reid's guitar, a trademark of the band since their landmark debut "Psychocandy" (1985).

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 felt a miraculous revival of the sacred fire of the Sex Pistols might be at hand. And indeed nothing about them betrayed that impression: incendiary live shows, a cocky, 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 (just the band's name says it all, not to mention lyrics that were far from schoolboy fare — in some cases bordering on hardcore).

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 go on to launch the fortunate adventure of Primal Scream), had already laid, with their first singles, the right groundwork to become figureheads of a "new" punk, one that could unite 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 in truth not far removed from the blasts that, on the other side of the ocean, characterised the new hardcore of Husker Du and Minutemen). A formula that paved the way for the "shoegaze" movement, which favours dark settings, delicate melodies and dense layers of feedback

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