SIMPLY RED return with new single ‘Better With You’ & announce new album ‘Time’
Simply Red are back! Four years since the triumphant Blue Eyed Soul, one of the UK’s most treasured bands return with brand new studio album Time – out May 26th on Warner Music. The record’s debut offering comes in the form of the sensational pop masterclass ‘Better With You.’
“On the song itself, I’m reminiscing on phase one of the relationship with my wife, when we first met in Milan. At that time, I was single and just partying my way around the world. And I thought to myself: well, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just going along, having a right old time. It just stemmed from there,” Mick Hucknall said of the track.
Over 12 vivid, heartfelt, life-giving tracks that mix soul, funk, R&B and blues, Time demonstrates an unerring ear for, feel for and passion for songs that move the emotion and the imagination. Recorded in London with longstanding producer Andy Wright and the close-knit cadre of musicians with whom he’s formed a matchless touring band, Hucknall is back – and not just with the label, Warner Music, with whom he began Simply Red’s musical adventure. He’s writing from, and about, himself.
“When we were in lockdown, I went, well, jeez, who am I actually?” he remembers. “What makes me tick? And I realised: you are a songwriter. So why don’t you write some songs about who you are? That’s really the essence of this album.”
The Irish singer reunites with DJ Koze for a heart-eyed disco single about the birds and the bees.
When Róisín Murphy turned up on DJ Koze’s 2018 album Knock Knock, the Irish singer’s grainy, muted vocal textures turned out to be the perfect foil for Koze’s oddball funk—smoothing over the crags, tempering the tone colors. Last month, the two musicians reunited on a vinyl-only single, “Can’t Replicate,” stretching Murphy’s breathy purr over a taut deep-house groove; now they shift into downbeat disco with the cozier “CooCool.” Koze has always seemed happiest when he’s being squirrely, and he tweaks tiny details—tin-can horn charts, a filigree of jazz guitar, what might be a cicada humming to itself—over a bed of warmly nostalgic ’60s soul until the laid-back track practically vibrates with antic energy. Whereas Murphy was steely and commanding on “Can’t Replicate,” adopting an ice queen’s poise, here she gives way to her most starry-eyed instincts: “That ol’ magic’s back/A warm feeling flooding/A new age of love/An incandescent joy.” At the chorus she slips into nonsense, rapturously proclaiming: “I hear a coo coo/I hear a cooing/Sweet lover coo coo.” It’s a song about the birds and the bees that asks, What if it could be springtime all the time? Or as Murphy herself puts it: “Let it be silly season, darlin’/All year round.”