The members described the song as “the most succinct and direct thing we’ve put out yet”
86TVs – the band made by former Maccabees members – have announced details of a self-titled debut album. Check out the new single ‘Tambourine’ below.
The band, comprised of The Maccabees alumni Hugo and Felix White, their brother Will White, and drummer Jamie Morrison (Noisettes and Stereophonics), first burst onto the scene as 86TVs with their debut EP ‘You Don’t Have To Be Yourself Right Now’.
Now, the band are preparing to share their first full-length album, with the eponymous LP set to arrive on August 2.
To celebrate the announcement, the group have dropped the intriguing new single ‘Tambourine’ – which was written as one of their first-ever tracks after forming.
“‘Tambourine’ was the first song we started working on as a band. It was written one summer when lots of people I knew were entering their 30s – a friend described their dad as a ‘human tambourine’ and it all found its way into that song,” explained Will White. “It’s two minutes long, the most succinct and direct thing we’ve put out yet.”
The track comes with a new wave knot of guitars, which evolve into an epic, brash chorus. Check it out below.
The song will serve as the second song on the 15-song tracklist for ‘86TVs’, and the album will deal with themes of nostalgia, loss and the search for purpose.
It’ll also see the White brothers tackle the loss of their mother to MS when they were children. While there is no specific song that addresses the experience, their shared memories are captured in much of the record’s mood and reflections.
“The feeling of missing someone comes up a lot in many different ways on the album. There’s a complexity to grief. There are moments where it feels like it happened yesterday and others where you can’t even remember it,” Felix White said. “Maybe it feels that there are certain things that are easier to communicate in a song. After our first gig someone came up to me and said it sounded like The Strokes if they’d had therapy.”
Find the album artwork and tracklist to ‘86TVs’ below, and visit here to pre-order.
‘86TVs’ tracklist is:
‘Modern Life’
‘Tambourine’
‘Days of Sun’
‘New Used Car’
‘Higher Love’
‘Komorebi’
‘Worn Out Buildings’
‘Pipe Dream’
‘Settled’
‘Someone Else’s Dream’
‘Spinning World’
‘A Million Things’
‘Need You Bad’
‘Dreaming’
‘Living Is A Drag’
86TVs will celebrate the album’s release by embarking upon a series of in-store acoustic launch shows and signing sessions, they also have a run of festival appearances taking place across the summer, as a slot at Alexandra Palace Park as special guests to Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. Visit here for remaining tickets.
86TVs upcoming shows are:
JUNE
22 – Isle of Wight Festival
JULY
20 – London, Alexandra Palace Park (with Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds)
27 – Truck Festival
28 – Tramlines
AUGUST
1 – London, Banquet Records
2 – Brighton, Resident Records
1–4 – Kendall Calling
4 – Y NOT? Festival
5 – Sheffield, Bear Tree Records
5 – Leeds, Jumbo Records
6 – Edinburgh, Assai Records
6 – Glasgow, Assai Records
7 – Liverpool, Jacaranda Baltic
8 – Bristol, Rough Trade
9 – London, Rough Trade East
23 – The Big Feastival
NOVEMBER
15-16 – Hamburg, Rolling Stone Beach
Speaking to NME in an interview about writing post-Maccabees and the direction of the new band, Felix explained how Johnny Marr, the former Smiths guitarist and songwriter, gave them some important advice for their new material.
“I think The Maccabees had just split up, but I’d read Johnny Marr’s autobiography, which I loved, and it was a really striking time to read it because a lot of his life has been about reinvention and change,” he recalled.
He continued: “So there was a correlation in my head at that particular moment in my life with what Johnny’s book had said. I bumped into him at the NME Awards and said, ‘Can I send you some music? We’ve just been doing some instrumental music and we don’t know if it’s good’. So I sent him all these instrumentals, which was actually quite a brazen thing to do looking back at it.”
