Moreish Idols announce debut album "All In The Game" & share new track "Dream Pixel" via Speedy Wunderground.
Today, Falmouth-formed Moreish Idols return with details of their highly anticipated debut album “All In The Game”, out 7th March on Speedy Wunderground.
The album follows their recent singles “Pale Blue Dot” and “Slouch” (with the former marking the label’s 50th 7” single), which have seen the band earn plaudits from the likes of international music outlets and BBC Radio 6 Music.
Moreish Idols have carved out a unique position for themselves in the burgeoning London scene. Whereas their debut material showcased a restless, jerky, jagged and rhythmically centred sound that bore the influence of energetic post-punk, their second EP showcased an entirely different side to the band.
This evolution saw the group stitch together a looser constellation of ideas, combining swooning tremolo guitars, prickly melodic riddles, erudite saxophone improvs, and flexible rhythms, sounding like Watery, Domestic-era Pavement one second and the bucolic Canterbury Scene the next, but always, always like Moreish Idols most of all.
Today’s announcement also sees the band share the album’s lead single “Dream Pixel”. Combining 70s inflected, layered vocals with psych-tinged, Gordian instrumentation that darts and weaves around broken beat rhythms, the track throbs with moments of intense saxophone, distorted guitars, mangled electronics, trembling synths, and reversed vocals, falling apart and piecing itself back together again as it comes to its climax. It’s another valiant testament to the band’s conscious effort to continually challenge their songwriting, told via Dan Carey’s (Speedy Wunderground’s co-founder and in-house producer) explorative creative filter.
Speaking on the single, the band says,
“’Dream Pixel’ is about what we all see in our dreams; the colours, sounds and occurrences that are often too surreal to put into words and leave you questioning how the subconscious can paint such a vivid, psychedelic picture.
Inspired by the experience of swimming in phosphorescence in Cornwall, ‘Dream Pixel’ celebrates the moments in life that could easily be mistaken for a dream, glitch or trip.”
Broadly speaking, the main themes running across the album centre around existentialism, memory, and illness. “All In The Game” considers how we understand our limited time on Earth:
“time being spent, time being wasted, time getting away from you, but being able to realise that time is what you make of it.”
explains bassist Caspar Swindells,
Moreish Idols is completed by vocalist-guitarists Tom Kellett and Jude Lilley, drummer Sol Lamey and saxophonist Dylan Humphreys.
Talent-spotted by Dan Carey, their jerky, agitated debut EP “Float” (2022) and more expansive, yearning follow-up “Locked Eyes And Collide” (2023) were acclaimed by tastemakers including BBC Radio 6 Music, and many more music websites.
“All In The Game” is filled with Carey’s eccentric production ideas, largely inspired by the concept of time. For the title-track, Carey asked Humphreys to play the same saxophone part at different tempos, recording onto tape which was itself moving at different speeds. He also suggested splitting one of the demo tracks in half, with the first half played as the opening track “Ambergrin”, and the second as the slower, less saturated outro “Time’s Wasting”: designed to sound like a memory of the former.
A nod to their debut EP “Float” – which can be played on a continuous loop – the return of the track in this more ethereal, ghostly form captures how ideas, stories and observations are changed by the process of remembering.
For the most part though, “All In The Game”’s existentialist questions revolve around more personal material. The fragmented story in “Railway”, sung from the perspective of a character determined seek her own path, was inspired by Lilley’s sister leaving home when he was young.
The title-track deals with a period in which Kellett’s father was having health issues: “how long does the wire stretch out?” he sings alongside Lilley, over a yearning, repeating arrangement of saxophone and guitar arpeggios. “Slouch” deals with Lilley’s diagnosis with Ankylosing Spondylitis: a form of arthritis that affects his spine and pelvis.
“The song’s celebrating how much the NHS sorted me out in some regards, who is now able to manage his symptoms with medication. “It was a reflection on never having problems with my health, and how – when you are finally rolled that dice – it’s just about adjusting to it and turning it into a bit of a superpower.”
says Lilley
For Lilley, the album is largely about “laughing in the face of despair – trying to find entertainment and solace in quite dark things that have happened to us, or just happen to everybody.”
This is the sort of resolution “All In The Game” always seems to be reaching towards: for all its heavy subject matter and probing questions about human fragility, the conclusions it reaches about life are uplifting, hopeful and affirming.
To celebrate the new album, Moreish Idols will head out on a headline UK tour in March 2025. The shows follow a run of packed-out live dates including Speedy Wunderground’s 50th single launch show, an appearance at Left Of The Dial, and a set at Beyond The Music, at which NME praised them for their “rushing, sweeping arrangements” and their “pulsing, unrelenting post-punk”.
The album will be available on ltd. edition orange vinyl
and is available for pre-order HERE.
Live Dates
Wed 5th March: Brighton - The Prince Albert
Thu 6th March: Portsmouth - The Deco
Fri 7th March: Manchester - The Castle Hotel
Sat 8th March: Newcastle - Xerox
Sun 9th March: Glasgow - McChuills
Tue 11th March: Leeds - Oporto
Wed 12th March: Bristol - Louisiana
Thu 13th March: Southampton - Heartbreakers
Fri 14th March: London – Omeara
Thu 20th March: Rotterdam - V11
Fri 21st March: Paris - Supersonic
Sat 22nd March: Marseille - L'Intermediaire
Tickets are available HERE