GRUMBLING FUR RETURN WITH NEW ALBUM THIS SEPTEMBER

Grumbling Fur photo by Kerry O’Sullivan

Grumbling Fur is the joint manifestation of Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan which, since 2011, has birthed a series of increasingly focused albums of psychedelic pop. Their new album Furfour, due for release on 16th September via Thrill Jockey, is a record that is the sum of a dizzying array of creative projects by two talented key figures in an esoteric underground still thriving despite the pressures and pains of modern London.

Furfour was made over the course of three years of writing and recording. It’s an album whose warm heart is shaped by birth, loss, friendship, death… all those things that happen to each one of us. Yet as ever with Grumbling Fur, it’s filtered through epic fantasy and sci-fi, Carlos Castenada, shamanic, mind warp, house ghosts and meditation. It’s remarkable that two such distinct personalities with their roots and much of their activity in the cultural leftfield, can somehow combine together in a record that sounds so rooted, hypnotic, and completely accessible to all.

The 12-tracks that make up Furfour were created not out of structure or theme, and rarely began at the beginning. Instead, Grumbling Fur work by generating sounds and ideas first and then molding structures and ideas around this. “Songs are about including the process in the finished piece and spontaneous ideas are laid down,and a structure starts to emerge from this source,” they explain: “first thought best thought is our motto.”

Furfour is a curious, generous-hearted and organic-sounding record that has its mood set by the easy harmonizing of O’Sullivan and Tucker’s voices as they float melodiously above clackering rhythms of Milky Light, strings as celestial beings in Silent Plans, scraps of half-heard spiritual texts and conversely, the dazzling synth-pop track Acid Ali Khan, which sounds, as one writer once summed up Grumbling Fur, “like Depeche Mode in a stone circle.”

Grumbling Fur – “Furfour”
Out 16th September via Thrill Jockey
Available on LP / CD / DL