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May 23, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Donald Milne

Scottish veterans Teenage Fanclub have announced a new album, Nothing Lasts Forever, and shared its first single, “Foreign Land,” via a music video. Nothing Lasts Forever is due out September 22 via Merge. Donald Milne directed the “Foreign Land” video. Check it out below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

Nothing Lasts Forever is the band’s 11th album and the follow-up to 2021’s Endless Arcade and 2016’s Here. Merge is putting out the album in America, but in the UK and Europe it’s out on their own label, PeMa.

Teenage Fanclub is led by its main songwriters and founding members Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley. The current lineup also features Francis Macdonald on drums, Dave McGowan (who’s been with Teenage Fanclub since 2004) on bass, and Euros Childs (formerly of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci) on keyboards. The bulk of the album was recorded last August at Rockfield Studios, in the Welsh countryside. Additional work was done at McGinley’s place in Glasgow.

“We like to get something out of where we go, and you can definitely hear a stamp of Rockfield on the record,” says McGinley in a press release. “We recorded our album Howdy there in the late ’90s. Prior to that I’d been a bit reluctant to go as everyone seemed to record there, especially if you were signed to Creation, but I thought I’d go and have a look at the place. When I went down there, I loved the fact that there’s no memorabilia about anyone who’s ever been in the studio. The only visual musical reference is a picture of Joe Meek on their office wall. Anyway, over 20 years after our first visit we decided to go back. When you’re there, it feels like your place. We’re really rubbish at trying to find words to describe how our music sounds, but maybe because we recorded in Rockfield in late summer, there’s something pastoral about the record.”

McGinley says they had no fixed plan for the album when showing up at the studio. “When we got offered 10 days in Rockfield, we weren’t ready in our minds but then we just thought, ‘Fuck it’ and went for it. If you’re sitting around waiting for the stars to align, you can end up never doing anything. We turned up and worked our way through ideas, and came up with some while we were there. The song ‘Foreign Land’ was born in the studio. If we hadn’t gone there at that point through happenstance, that song wouldn’t exist. We like to let things happen. As people, we find a deadline inspiring. We like to put ourselves on the spot and see what happens. We usually get away with it. This record is the cliche of the blank canvas, which thankfully we managed to fill.”

Blake adds: “We’ve all been playing together for such a long time. In the past, whoever had written the song would have been the director. ‘This is how I’m hearing the drums, if you could play the bass like this…’ We don’t do that now. Raymond or myself would just bring in the idea and people would listen and play what works with it. We’d play for a couple of hours and that would be the arrangement. There’s a trust that comes from knowing each other such a long time, a kind of telepathy. Everyone knows where they fit in the puzzle.”

Coincidentally and independently McGinley and Blake found themselves tackling similar themes in their songwriting for Nothing Lasts Forever. The press release says one of the recurring themes on album is “light, as a both a metaphor for hope and as an ultimate destination further down the road.”

“We never talk about what we’re going to do before we start making a record,” McGinley explains. “We don’t plan much other than the nuts and bolts of where we’re going to record and when. That thing about light was completely accidental; we didn’t realize that until we’d finished half the songs. The record feels reflective, and I think the more we do this thing, the more we become comfortable with going to that place of melancholy, feeling and expressing those feelings.”

Blake adds: “These songs are definitely personal. You’re getting older, you’re going into the cupboard getting the black suit out more often. Thoughts of mortality and the idea of the light must have been playing on our minds a lot. The songs on the last record were influenced by the breakup of my marriage. It was cathartic to write those songs. These new songs are reflective of how I’m feeling now, coming out of that period. They’re fairly optimistic, there’s an acceptance of a situation and all of the experience that comes with that acceptance. When we write, it’s a reflection of our lives, which are pretty ordinary. We’re not extraordinary people, and normal people get older. There’s a lot to write about in the mundane. I love reading Raymond Carver. Very often there’s not a lot that happens in those stories, but they speak to lived experience.”

Nothing Lasts Forever Tracklist:

1. Foreign Land
2. Tired of Being Alone
3. I Left a Light On
4. See the Light
5. It’s Alright
6. Falling Into The Sun
7. Self-Sedation
8. Middle of My Mind
9. Back to the Light
10. I Will Love You

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