With the rich orchestrations of multi-instrumentalist Dickon Hinchliffe and the rich vocals of Stuart A. Staples, Tindersticks’ sound is characterized by a synthesis of orchestral backing, lounge jazz, and soul.
Tindersticks have announced their headline gig at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Saturday 15th March 2025.
Tickets from €50.70 including booking fee & €1.50 restoration levy on sale now with Ticketmaster Ireland
Please note, this is a fully seated show.
Five years after No Treasure but Hope (2019) and three years after 2021’s Distractions, Tindersticks return with new album ‘Soft Tissue’ to be released on City Slang on October 13th 2024. “New World”, the first track written for Soft Tissue and a springboard for the album’s thematic concerns about personal/public worlds knocked off-kilter. The arrangements pick up close to where 2016’s The Waiting Room left off and steer the record into febrile terrain, balanced between the band letting loose, Julian Siegel’s brass arrangements, Dan McKinna’s string arrangements and Gina Foster’s soulful backing vocals. Meanwhile, Staples’s introspective reflections lead to a refrain that takes a more outward-looking slant, flagged up on a banner in the song’s playful promo video: “I won’t let my love become my weakness.” The video, as well as the albums sleeve made with Staples’ artist daughter Sidonie Osborne Staples.
Staples says “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 rigour of the songwriting and the joy of the band playing together with a more hard-nosed experimental approach”
A tangible sense of mutual curiosity propels the five members of Tindersticks to fresh territory on Soft Tissue, their 14th album proper. Previously, on No Treasure but Hope (2019), these mavens of mood and beauty had embraced a kind of dusky, live-sounding naturalism, followed by the bracingly executed experimental left-turns of 2020’s Distractions. As resilient and flexible as its title suggests, Soft Tissue connects and exceeds those extremes, drawing new life from the contrasts and convergences of its tight, intuitive songs and restless details. Nurtured into being by the band and their collaborators as a kind of open “conversation”, says singer and producer Stuart Staples, the result is the sound of a band inspired by a fervent shared desire – and capacity – to surprise themselves. “I think I was looking for both these elements,” explains Stuart, reflecting on the record’s fluent navigation of intimacy and experiment. “We wanted to find a way to have the energy of the band playing together and that scrutiny of songwriting but to not let up on how interesting the music can be sonically’.
With the vocals, strings and brass completed in London, the result upholds Tindersticks’ extraordinarily sustained commitment to ambition and exploration, stretching back more than three decades. If the symphonic ruminations of Tindersticks’ trio of 1993-7 albums established them as trend-averse explorers of great depth and reach, Simple Pleasure(1999) and Can Our Love… (2001) proved equally adept at exploring contrasting textures within tighter contexts. After 2003’s twinkling Waiting for the Moon, and an emotional live performance of their second album in 2006, the band said farewell to three old bandmates, leaving Staples, Fraser and Boulter to start again. McKinna (multi-instrumentalist) and Thomas Belhom (drums) joined for the warming rebirth of The Hungry Saw (2008), before Harvin took over on drums for the increasingly confident Falling Down a Mountain (2010) and the palpably freeing The Something Rain (2012).
Later work equipped Tindersticks’ inquisitive impetus with fertile focus. Between compositions for the First World War commemorations (Ypres, 2014) and F Percy Smith’s microscopic movies (Minute Bodies, 2017), 2016’s The Waiting Room crackled with global sounds. Staples then delivered a solo album (Arrhythmia, 2018) and the soundtrack to director Claire Denis’s science-fiction film High Life, strengthening the band’s long-term ties to the filmmaker – soundtracks to Denis’s Stars at Noon and Both Sides of the Blade have since followed.No Treasure but Hope and Distractions affirmed the band’s readiness to stretch themselves, to live and breathe inside their music. More recently, two 2023 France shows devoted to their hugely varied 10-film work with Denis upheld the band’s adaptable determination to actively pursue ever-bigger challenges. Says Stuart: “It’s about being more demanding, more ambitious, and then coming out the other end of it feeling as though you’ve achieved something.”
On Soft Tissue, that ambition takes the form of a fluid, questing take on what Tindersticks can be, anchored by a sense of trust between the bandmates. As Stuart explains, “In this band, I think that there’s so much… I was going to say talent but it’s got nothing to do with talent, really, it’s about that desire, that need to reach for something and to go to places you haven’t been. And I feel that comes from everybody. I didn’t feel as though there was any kind of restriction about, or any dogma about, what this record could be, beyond where it takes us and what excites us.”
