Boston Manor’s third full-length GLUE is the sound of a band questioning the state of the world around them. Inevitably, in a critical examination of the modern world, it comes from a dark place, but one that fuelled the five-piece to create a body of work that elevates their craft further than ever before. Its 13 highly charged songs came out of a process that singer Henry Cox describes as “very chaotic”, but the result is a truly ferocious album - one that both draws and moves on from what they’ve done in the past, incorporating the gloomy atmospherics of 2018’s Welcome To The Neighbourhood with the highly charged yet melodic punk of 2016’s debut Be Nothing. Yet while GLUE consolidates the different musical avenues Boston Manor have explored since forming in 2013, it’s very much an album that represents who they are – and reflects the state of the world – in 2020.
Like Welcome To The Neighbourhood, GLUE was recorded at The Barber Shop studios in New Jersey, but with a very different approach to that record. Produced by Mike Sapone and engineered by Brett Romnes, Cox admits that these are not just the most primal and plain-speaking songs the band – completed by guitarists Mike Cunniff and Ash Wilson, bassist Dan Cunniff and drummer Jordan Pugh – have ever recorded, but everything the previous seven years have been leading up to.
