Peter Milton Walsh and his celebrated outfit The Apartments are set to release a new record this September, with In and Out of The Light serving as the group’s first album in five years.
Scheduled for release on September 18th, In and Out of The Light first came about a year ago, with recording beginning in Sydney at the end of winter. With a few hours of recording taking place each day for a few days each week, the record was finished in summer, with the final mix completed one day before COVID-19 hit Australia this year.
According to a press release, the new record follows “a set of characters who, in the aftermath of loss or simply the changes that turn up in everyone’s lives, have gone looking for some other way to live—and found it,” with the eight-track record set to serve as a perfect continuation for the acclaimed Brisbane outfit’s legacy.
Featuring Walsh and bass player Eliot Fish, the new record features the talents of French Apartments Natasha Penot and Antoine Chaperon, in addition to the work of English drummer Nick Allum. Frequent collaborator Chris Abrahams of The Necks also contributes piano on the new album, while Miro Bukovsky plays trumpet and flugelhorn, appearing once again following a spot on 2015’s No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal.
To celebrate the announcement of the new record, The Apartments shared “Pocketful of Sunshine” as its first single, which was premiered on BrooklynVegan over the weekend.
“After a show in Paris I got talking to someone who told me that Apartments songs had helped them through a hard time,” Walsh explained of the new single. “That immediately interested me.
“While I’m drawn to all kinds of stories, I’ve always been interested in how people get themselves in trouble and how they deal with it. For some people an event—death, divorce, the unexpected ending of something—has completely upturned their world.
“Life has thrown everything at them, and nothing is what it used to be. Yet they kept going. How? In these sorts of situations, people lean on one another. Find something in someone else they don’t have themselves. At some point, everyone will need somebody to show them some blue sky.”
The Apartments first formed in Brisbane at the end of the Seventies before a stint with The Go-Betweens saw them reform in the mid-Eighties and begin releasing full-length albums. The group’s biggest success came by way of an appearance of “The Shyest Time” on the soundtrack to John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful, while This Mortal Coil covered “Mr Somewhere” for their final album in 1991.
While the group effectively ended in 1999, a reformation in 2007 resulted in the release of No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal – their first album in 18 years – in 2015.
The Apartments’ In and Out of The Light is set to be released on September 18th, with pre-orders available now.
The Apartments, In and Out of The Light Tracklist
1. Pocketful of Sunshine
2. Write Your Way Out of Town
3. Where You Used to Be
4. What’s Beauty to Do
5. Butterfly Kiss
6. We Talked Through Till Dawn
7. I Don’t Give a Fuck About You Anymore
8. The Fading Light
