THE DURUTTI COLUMN TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM
Vini Reilly’s distinctive guitar sounds return on a new album from The Durutti Column. Renascent arrives 46 years after the band’s debut and incorporates their particular talent for experimental, dreamlike moods.
Consisting of Reilly alongside longstanding drummer/percussionist Bruce Mitchell and producer/instrumentalist Keir Stewart, The Durutti Column’s latest album is described as one that both honours their past while also reaffirms their enduring creative vitality. Renascent marks the group’s first collection of new material since 2010’s A Paean to Wilson.
Musically, Renascent exists in a dialogue between past and present. Tracks such as ‘Time Present and Time Past’ evoke a cyclical sense of motion: forward-looking yet reflective. Reilly’s improvisational approach remains central: spontaneous, intuitive, and resistant to formal constraints. “Every single piece of music writes itself,” he notes, and the album’s recordings preserve that immediacy. Pieces like ‘Vapour in a Matchbox’ exemplify this ethos, transforming fleeting inspiration into compositions of lasting emotional depth.
The album also reunites the band with original Factory design collaborators, Mark Holt and Hamish Muir of 8vo, whose artwork mirrors the music’s balance of modernist precision and romantic warmth through rich, sensuous colour.
For Reilly, “empathy is the essence of humanity, if you lose that ability to empathize, it’s the deadening of your own soul.” Renascent deepens that tradition, with many of its pieces shaped by personal connections and human stories. That empathy is also expressed in the love that Stewart and Mitchell have put into realizing Reilly’s vision. “Vin’s songs are constantly surprising,” says Mitchell, “you want to keep on listening to them over and over again.” On hearing the completed Renascent Mitchell says: “it’s like a child that leaves home for a long time and then they return and you love them all the more all over again.”
Renascent will be released this July, available across a number of formats including digital, CD (both with the bonus track ‘All They See is Fire’) and transparent yellow vinyl. There will also be a limited-edition vinyl featuring alternative artwork, pressed on bottle green vinyl and featuring an oversized booklet. The official Durutti Column store will host some very limited editions including a cassette, and a very special edition slipcase version of the album (limited to 1,000 copies worldwide) with alternative artwork, heavyweight black vinyl, a DVD with unique visualizers for every track, 4 art prints and a folded poster. Rough Trade have their own exclusive edition of the album (limited to 500 copies), a split purple / green vinyl version, with a bonus flexi disc of ‘All They See is Fire.”
Renascent is released 31 July via London Records
Pre-order: https://thedurutticolumn.lnk.to/Renascent
Photo: Christopher Thomond / The Guardian / eyevine