It’s been two years since Spector released the critically acclaimed sophomore album ‘Moth Boys’, a record which indicated just what Fred, Jed, Tom and Danny are capable of. Its lead track ‘All The Sad Young Men’ became their most successful song to date and a calling card of their energetic and emotional live shows.
The newly announced Ex-Directory EP, with the brilliant single ‘Untitled In D’ is out on March 9 2018. Yet another step up from the band, it comes complete with the kind of undeniable hook you just can’t dislodge from your brain, with Fred Macpherson’s witty, sophisticated and sometimes poignant lyrics tackling the growing commodification of everything, including human interaction. This is Spector at their very best - older, less filtered and more human.
Fred elaborates;
“Untitled In D’s been burning a hole in Spector’s pocket for a little while now. I wrote the bones of it pretty quickly then Jed came through and channeled the ghost of John Frusciante on guitar and we knew we were on to something. After the sheen of our first two albums it was exciting capturing something simple and irreverent - the sound of us playing in a room rather than playing in a computer.”
A video shot around their appearance at this year’s Concrete and Grass Festival in Shanghai accompanies the song. The EP also features three other tracks, including the irresistibly melancholic ‘Wild Guess’ and the high tempo eighties pop of ‘Fine Not Fine’, which includes the inimitable line “I know scum who sold their stories, some of your best friends are Tories.” The collection’s rounded off with ‘Local International’, the grown-up sibling of Moth Boys’ Kyoto Garden and Decade of Decay.
Spector are a four-piece band from London, England. They played their first shows in 2011, after Fred Macpherson’s old school friend (and guitarist in their teenage band Les Incompétents) Chris Burman heard a home demo of his song Never Fade Away and convinced him they should start a band. After various lineup changes, they were joined by Tom Shickle, Jed Cullen and Danny Blandy, recording the track as their first single later that year. They signed to Fiction Records and released their first album Enjoy It While It Lasts in the summer of 2012, performing internationally at festivals including Reading, Benicassim and Coachella and supporting Florence and the Machine on tour across the UK and Europe. Burman left the band in 2013 shortly before sessions in New York with Dev Hynes, which laid the groundwork for their second album Moth Boys, produced by the band themselves alongside Duncan Mills and Adam Jaffrey. Released in 2015, it featured All The Sad Young Men, which became Spector’s most successful song to date. Continued touring took them to to Mexico, Russia and more recently Shanghai, where they filmed the video for their latest single Untitled in D, the first track from 2018’s Ex-Directory EP.