Wall of Sound PR

Alcopop! Records are delighted to announce that they have signed Leeds-based rock quartet PULLED APART BY HORSES and will release their long-awaited fifth studio album in Spring 2022, with further details to be revealed over the coming months.

As a first taste of the record, the band are proud to reveal lead single ‘First World Problems’, which is released on 5th October 2021 via all good digital service providers, and is the first new material from the band since their stand alone 2019 single ‘Is This Thing On?’.

The track has already picked up its first few spins at radio from Huw Stephens at BBC 6music and John Kennedy at Radio X.

‘First World Problems’ is as lyrically relevant now as it was when it was written (pre-COVID) and is pretty much ‘what you hear is what you get’, as vocalist Tom Hudson explains it as, “a voiced frustration towards our groomed, individualist society, where the real world and our online world is full of constant venting of minor/trivial annoyances as if they are the centre of the universe, when really there are more pressing matters out there and a far bigger picture.”

Serving as the sonic blueprint for the next PABH chapter, ‘First World Problems’ was inspired by late ‘70s garage rock, post-punk, and heavy weight rockers like Iggy And The Stooges, The Rolling Stones, Bowie and The Cramps.

For the forthcoming new album, the band made a collective decision to create a set of songs that were minimal, simple, direct, and delivered with rawness and urgency. The biggest change in the band’s approach to date sees Hudson ditching his guitar and focusing solely on vocals—their trademark duelling guitars may have been a signature of PABH’s sound across their previous four albums, but cutting their line up back to one guitar, bass, drums and vocals has given the band a refreshed, leaner feel.

Commenting on the new approach, vocalist Tom Hudson says: “The fat was trimmed! We spent months playing the songs for the new album in our practice space and on a small ‘up close and personal’ UK tour to set them in stone. We headed to the Nave studio in Leeds off the back of that tour and captured the tracks live, tour tight and locked in!”

A name that should need no introduction to most, Pulled Apart By Horses are less a gang and more one big f*cked-up dysfunctional family. The Leeds quartet are a tightly-knit rock band who make music that thrills and menaces, their songs armed with suckerpunch riffs and zinging choruses.

They formed in 2008 from the remnants of various bands in Leeds, and since then have existed in their own chaotic ecosystem, embarking on relentless tours around the world and stopping only to make 2010’s punkily infectious self-titled debut Pulled Apart By Horses and its snarling 2012 follow-up Tough Love produced by Gil Norton (Pixies,Foo Fighters).

Everything the band have done has been drenched in a sense of youthful recklessness, of all-or-nothing ardour. With their third album, Blood, they took things a step forward with wider musical and lyrical themes, embracing their love of psychedelic cinema and developing as a band whilst retaining the thrilling “Horses” sound.

But life doesn’t come with a user manual. Amid the constant noise, clamour and confusion of the Information Age, sometimes—as with much of the technology which surrounds us—human beings work best after simply being switched off, unplugged, reconnected and switched back on again, or, more accurately, the band felt a simple desire to fall in love all over again with the pure joy of making music.

“Our musical tastes change monthly, never mind over the course of the years, so we are never going to be the kind of band who’d do the same album every time,” says vocalist Tom Hudson of their evolution. “We’ve always been that band that are ‘too heavy for the indie kids, and too indie for the heavy kids’ in industry terms, but it’s quite cool that people don’t really know where to put us, because it means no-one can easily slap a genre name upon us. Now we have the freedom to just be who we are.”

With the trials and tribulations of their critically acclaimed fourth album The Haze behind them, Pulled Apart By Horses have emphatically returned, and are approaching 2021 with fresh perspectives, open minds, and a flurry of creativity—writing new songs, defining their sound, and wrestling back control of their own artistic process.
Further details of the band’s long-awaited fifth album will follow over the coming months.

New single ‘First World Problems’ released 05.10.21 on Alcopop! Records