Lovejoy: Against The Tide
(Spinout Nuggets / Shelflife)
DL / Streaming
Out Now
Lovejoy release their first new music in over a year with Against The Tide, the first taster from the new album Under The Weather which is scheduled for release on 31 July.
Against The Tide sees the noisier, dreampop / shoegaze influences of Lovejoy’s sound coming to the fore. They’ve created a hypnotic, wave of sound that climbs and soars into the choruses. With MBV style harmonies and cavernous guitars, the mood of the song is soothed with dark beauty.
Lovejoy returned in 2024 after an extended sabbatical, with the warmly received album …And It’s Love! The band, known for their lush, elegant take on indie pop, the band, first made their mark in the late ’90s and early 2000s with a series of well-loved—and now highly sought-after—7” singles, EPs and albums. Dick Preece had formed Lovejoy in around 1998 after meeting up with fellow Brighton resident Keith Girdler, who was in Blueboy at the time. Preece was encouraged by the vocalist and Paul Stewart, Blueboy’s guitarist. After working on a few tracks and mailing them out to labels they signed and released a handful of singles and three albums, Songs In The Key Of…; Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire and Everybody Hates… on Santa Barbara’s Matinee Recordings.
Lovejoy then took an extended sabbatical from 2007, following the devastating loss of Girdler, his long-time friend, confidante and collaborator to cancer.
Preece only returned to music in 2022, interestingly reaching back into the past to guide his future. Back in 2001, Lovejoy released the single Plays The Hits Of Biff Bang Pow! The first things recorded by Preece back in the studio was another of Alan McGee’s Biff Bang Pow! tracks, Miss You, along with the Ed Ball track, When You Lose Your Lover You Learn To Lose, as a test to see if he still had the ability to record/ play and sing after so many years out of it all. 2024 also saw Lovejoy’s Dick Preece back on stage, performing stripped-back acoustic sets in support of the record. The momentum didn’t stop there — he found himself in a rich vein of songwriting, recording new material, such as the 2025 single Let There Be Love, and collaborating along the way with the aforementioned Alan McGee.
As well as single being released on 5th June, the presale for Under The Weather also begins and is available to preorder via the following links… Lovejoy, Spinout Nuggets and Shelflife
Lovejoy photo supplied by Dick Preece
All words by Iain Key. See his author profile here or find him via his LinkTree
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