Tracey Thorn - Record

Record is the fifth solo studio album by English singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn, released in March 2018 via Unmade Road in Europe and Merge Records in the US.

Backtracking, it is hard to find a decade recently where Tracey Thorn’s voice and songwriting has not been influential. Fresh out of school in the UK in the early 1980s, she formed the cult girl band Marine Girls, whose two-album career of edgy teen love songs has influenced lo-fi indie bands ever since. Among noted Marine Girls fans you’ll find Kurt Cobain (Nirvana was reportedly rehearsing “In Love” before Cobain’s death).

In 1982, Tracey followed it with her own solo album the eight-song mini-classic, A Distant Shore, which catapulted her to the top of the UK indie charts.

Throughout the 1980s, she shared writing with partner Ben Watt in the British duo Everything But The Girl (EBTG). In the ’90s, she co-wrote EBTG’s global smash “Missing” before delivering lyrics, melody, and vocals for one of the decade’s seminal ballads, Massive Attack’s “Protection,” and contributing centrally to EBTG’s best-selling electronica crossover albums Walking Wounded and Temperamental.

After a self-imposed hiatus to start a family, she returned in 2007 with her second solo album, the glittering folk-disco of Out of the Woods, the starkly beautiful Love and Its Opposite in 2010, and her 2012 alternative holiday album, Tinsel and Lights.

“Nine feminist bangers,” Tracey Thorn joked when asked to describe her first solo album of entirely original material in seven years. Resplendent in Ewan Pearson’s unashamedly glittering electro-pop production, Record was released in March 2018.

“I think I’ve always written songs which chronicle the milestones of a woman’s life,” she says. “Different ages and stages, different realities not often discussed in pop lyrics. If 2010’s Love and Its Opposite was my mid-life album—full of divorce and hormones—then this album represents that sense of liberation that comes in the aftermath, from embarking on a whole new ‘no fucks given’ phase of life.”  “I wanted it to be a record you’d listen to in the daytime,” Tracey says. “On your headphones or on the move. Not necessarily in the evening, or in your bedroom.”

On Record, the synth-driven tracks arrive and leave with a punchy sub-three-minute directness. The album packs an eloquent punch. As ever, the personal has often been political in Tracey Thorn’s work.

Across four decades, her songs and writing have offered up a clear-eyed woman’s view of the immediate world around her, from the acerbic teen love songs of her first early ’80s band Marine Girls through sixteen years as one-half of articulate multimillion-selling duo Everything But The Girl, to her recent acclaimed memoirs and journalism.

Check out the tracks:  “Queen”; and “Sister”.

This LP record is on 180 gram black vinyl housed in a gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeve and digital download code, pressed in Europe.