Saint Etienne’s 11th studio album is perfectly timed to coincide with the arrival of the bleak midwinter. Having started out 30 years ago as the toast of Britpop’s smart set, the now veteran trio of Bob Stanley, Sarah Cracknell and Pete Wiggs arrive at the tail end of 2024 with a concept record about the chilly thoughts that race through the middle-aged mind when the lights dim and a long, lonely night stretches ahead. Say hello to the insomniac street preachers.
This pensive three-piece were always a challenge to pin down. In the early 1990s Saint Etienne were part of the chic Heavenly Social scene that also spawned the big-beat monsters the Chemical Brothers.
But their confessional songs were too meditative to rank as dance music and excessively pop to fit alongside their scruffier indie contemporaries. In the glory days of Britpop – when everyone was yelling “oi!” in their finest mockney accents – they were off covering Neil Young in the style of 1960s French chansons and sampling Dusty Springfield. Quietly subversive, Stanley, Cracknell and Wiggs were happiest tramping in the margins of the mainstream.
That haze of mystery surrounding Saint Etienne was further fuelled by the fact that they changed radically between records. Their 1991 debut, Foxbase Alpha, was steeped in frothy Europop. But Tiger Bay, from 1994, was kitchen-sink Kraftwerk, its sleek synth lines affixed to lyrics that touched on topics as far-flung as suburban melancholy and the challenge of finding a suitor in Regency England.
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Their latest is a deeply satisfying, moreish rumination on the eternal mysteries of deepest, darkest night. “The kind of record I like to listen to in the dark or with my eyes closed” is how Wiggs pitches it. Ethereal mid-life-crisis pop music might be another description for a collection that cuts and pastes song fragments around eddies of ambient noise.
Cracknell’s voice is the perfect delivery mechanism for the project’s thoughtful ennui: even when it gets weird, her calm, assuring presence keeps things tethered to reality. Kicking off with the downcast burblings of Settle, the LP pivots into actual pop music on Half Light, which finds Cracknell framed by the setting sun and haunted by a vision of a woman she “can see through the trees at half-light”.
With cold washes of synth pouring in from all around, the singer’s poised coo is uncharacteristically creepy. That same effect rings through on Nightingale, where she sings starkly about “silence building, heavy in the air”.
The emotional centrepiece is Preflyte, where folk instruments flutter ominously – is that a flute parping through the void? – as Cracknell prepares to bid farewell to a grown child ready to leave home. “I could have put my foot down and stood in your way/ But I let you fly,” she sings, at once proud and heartbroken.
“Pete and I have slightly older kids who are currently leaving home,” Cracknell said in a recent podcast. “We wanted to write a little about having kids – they’re fleeing the nest. And about how that makes you feel,” she said. “The things you remember from when they were small and having to let them go. We had a bit of that going on in the background.”
A sense of daylight dying and shadows stealing in pulsates through The Night (“It feels like October even when it might not be,” Cracknell proclaims on Wonderlight). But these frosty emotions are intermingled with nostalgia as Saint Etienne look back on their 1990s glory years and are forced to reckon with the speed with which the past is receding. Those days are gone. In fact, they no longer even feel like a chapter of their life so much as very ancient history, as Cracknell acknowledges on When You Were Young (“the times we had, the things you said”).
It’s gorgeously bleak, though you won’t be slapping it on at a Christmas party – unless you want to clear the room in five minutes. The only concession to the old-fashioned pop-factory milieu that was once Saint Etienne’s natural haunt is Hear My Heart, a gorgeous piece of soft rock that sounds like Fleetwood Mac: The Flotation Tank Years.
It’s a shard of light at the end of an album heavy with stillness and layered with the sort of dread that creeps up at 4am, when your troubles feel as real as the rain tapping against the window.
