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Jun 17, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Neil Fraser

Tindersticks are releasing a new album, Soft Tissue, on September 13 via City Slang. Now they have shared its third single, “Nancy.” Listen below.

Tindersticks’ frontman Stuart Staples had this to say about the song in a press release: “Some say that there are only a few different types of songs. Nancy definitely falls in to the classic ’guy fucks up / begs for forgiveness’ bracket—but hopefully with a few surprises along the way. Like much of Soft Tissue, the musical spark of excitement came from the creation of the rhythm track—Earl Harvin gated, echoed and fused with a CR78. Dan McKinna’s bass and David Boulter’s organ arpeggios combining into a heavy sauce. Nice brass too.”

When the album was announced Tindersticks shared Soft Tissue’s second single, “New World,” via a music video. “New World” was one of our Songs of the Week. The band also announced some EU and UK tour dates. Soft Tissue also includes “Falling, the Light,” a new song from the album the band shared on Valentine’s Day.

Soft Tissue is the band’s 14th studio album, not including their soundtrack work, and is the follow-up to 2021’s Distractions and 2016’s The Waiting Room. In 2020, they also shared an EP entitled See My Girls and 2022 they scored Claire Denis’ film The Stars At Noon.

Staples released a solo album, Arrhythmia, in 2018 via City Slang. In 2019 he scored the Claire Denis film High Life, which starred Robert Pattinson. Tindersticks contributed the new song “Willow” to the soundtrack and it featured the vocals of Pattinson.

Staples had this to say about Soft Tissue: “‘Baby I was falling, but the shit that I was falling through. Thought it was just the world rising.’ These are the opening lines of the album, it seems all the songs on Soft Tissue inhabit this confusion somehow—despairing at the destruction, suspecting you are responsible.

“Musically, it seemed that since 2016’s The Waiting Room, the band’s output had been reactionary. The last two tindersticks have been so opposed to each other—2019’s No Treasure But Hope was an extremely naturalistic recording process—due in part as a reaction to the previous few years of experimental projects (High Life, Minute Bodies) and in turn as a reaction to this purity 2021’s Distractions became one of the bands most dense, experimental albums.

“It felt like time to stop lurching to these extremes and to find a way to marry the rigor of the songwriting and the joy of the band playing together with a more hard-nosed experimental approach.”

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