Blues brothers (and sister)

The last Los Campesinos! album, 2013's No Blues, was to my mind their best to date (and Gareth agrees) - so it's heartening to hear that they're busy working on a follow-up which is likely to be released early next year. Tom's already written the music - described as "fantastic" and "really exciting" by Gareth and as "a bunch of loud euphoric pop songs that'll hopefully make you dance and cry" by their composer - and now Gareth has quit his job and is "spending a lot of time day-drinking in beer gardens with a note pad, scratching down drunken ideas".

Less heartening are Gareth's cryptic reference to the last two years being "extremely frustrating for a bunch of reasons I can't really mention", to the extent that they've "been forced into questioning whether we want to do this anymore or why we're still here" - so the fact that that questioning has resulted in an "excited, affirmative answer" in the form of the new songs comes as a relief.

(Thanks to Ian for the link.)