Half Life

Three years ago Saint Etienne returned with an album called I've Been Trying To Tell You. It was largely well recieved but I think a bit of an opinion splitter too but I loved it- the album was steeped in the mists of memory and the recent past, based around the long gone optimism of the period 1997 to 2001. According to Bob Stanley it was about 'optimism, the late 90s and how memory is an unreliable narrator'. The songs are sample based, Pete Wiggs taking elements from unlikely sources from that time period- Natalie Imbruglia, Honeyz, Lighthouse Family, Samantha Mumba, Tasmin Archer and The Lightning Seeds- and combining them with found sounds and synths/ laptop programming. The songs are all drenched in a woozy haze, a slowness, fragments of a dream, a weird nostalgia for a period that feels disconnected from today despite being relatively recent. It also refused to draw any firm conclusions about that period- what was it? Were things getting better? Did it just feel that way because we were younger? 

Pond House

The album was followed by an Christmas EP, led by the magnificently wintry and melancholic Her Winter Coat. 

The EP also had this song, Lillehammer, an instrumental that takes the laptop ambience that forms the background to I've Been Trying To Tell You and breaks things further apart, the sound of dusk at 4pm in December. 

Lillehammer

Now Saint Etienne are about to release a new album, The Night, out this Friday. It's been preceded by a single, Half Life, which is the feel of the songs from I've Been Trying To Tell You and the Christmas EP but even more so. Half Life is less than two minutes long, an ambient Saint Etienne lost on the edge of town as darkness falls, far away from things. Sarah whispers. Washes of synth drift by. A mistreated piano plays an out of tune melody line. Bass bumps away slightly. On its own it floats by quickly, only just there. As part of an album I imagine it will be surrounded by similar songs, part of a late 2024 ambient Saint Etienne treat.