(via Mute)
A CERTAIN RATIO have announced details of a new album, produced by Dan Carey, and an extensive UK tour for spring 2024. It All Comes Down to This, their thirteenth studio album, will be released via Mute on 19 April 2024.
Listen to the exuberant call-to-arms that is the album’s opener, ‘All Comes Down to This’, positive proof that the band have, once again, been able to tap into a new artery of life.
The new album, due out almost exactly a year after their acclaimed release, 1982, is further evidence of the mentality that defines A Certain Ratio, one that has always set them apart from their peers – a dogged, relentless demand to evolve, re-assess and reinvent with every new release. After the confident, sprawling, pan-genre strut of 1982 and a tour that celebrated 45 years of ACR performing live, comes this new record from completely out of leftfield. The record’s ten tracks present ten distinct moods, every bursting moment of it is defiantly, resiliently alive. It All Comes Down to This, for now at least, is the sound of the current incarnation of A Certain Ratio. The purest distillation of their essential sound ever committed to tape, and the first time they have recorded as just the core trio of principle band members – multi-instrumentalists Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson.
“It’s the Ratio removing the safety net,” Kerr says, explaining the decision to strip away the excess and return to the band’s base ingredients. “Every element of everything we’ve done on this album has been a change.”
“It wasn’t a matter of rubbing everyone else out, it was, ‘let’s find the thing that makes us work’,” adds Johnson. “And we know that’s just the three of us being as basic as possible – no frills, no major overdubs. Just visceral and happening in the moment.”
The other essential difference between It All Comes Down to This and its immediate predecessors is the recording process: after already working together on a remix for Loco Remezclada (2021), the band turned to the doyen of contemporary underground rock producers, Dan Carey (Black Midi, Kae Tempest, Black Country New Road) to work on the album. Known for his rejection of sonic clutter and his uncompromising focus on the central tenets of the bands and artists he produces, Carey’s instincts closely aligned with ACR’s desire to return to the basics.
By honing in on the band’s essential building blocks, Carey has teased out a brittle, inner darkness that has always been latent in ACR, but not always at the surface. And if there is a residual darkness in the album’s sonic aesthetic, then it pervades the subject matter, too.
“We wrote the album while the world was in turmoil,” explains Moscrop. “Which it still is. If you think about climate change, corporate war, the environment, Trump in power, Johnson, the Ukraine war, Israel and Palestine, it really does all come down to this. It’s probably the most political album we’ve written.”
In addition, Jez Kerr was dealing with specific personal darkness after an accident left him with a broken pelvis and fractured hip, and, on the day he was released from hospital, he contracted septic arthritis. His recovery meant that the recording of the album was delayed by six months, and the lasting impact of the experience inevitably dictates part of the album’s mood.
Far from deterred, though, Kerr, Moscrop and Johnson have come through with a renewed mission statement, and this spring the trio will be joined on bass by Viv Griffin for an extensive UK tour. The band intend to play the album in its glorious entirety, an endeavour they have never previously attempted, underscoring the unrivalled cohesion that this particular body of work possesses. Many jewels from the past will also adorn the set lists too, and, like ever, reworked and remodelled, the band proud of their past, rather than dependent upon it – full details below.
As a snapshot of where A Certain Ratio stand in 2024, It All Comes Down to This is a towering testament to their staying power. For a band whose path has intersected with the lives of Joy Division, The Fall, Talking Heads, Madonna and Grace Jones, to now be immersed in their most creative and prolific period since the early 1980s, puts the great majority of their contemporaries to shame. But then again, when you have always been preoccupied with laying the groundwork for your next steps, you’re unlikely ever to derive much satisfaction from standing still.
It All Comes Down to This is out on Mute on vinyl, CD, and digitally on 19 April 2024.