Mogwai, the return: almost 7 minutes of melancholy beauty

Their latest album is 2021’s “As the Love Continues”. Mogwai return with new single “God Gets You Back” and announce a world tour in 2025. This is the first new music in 2024, with more on the way, and follows the presentation of “Mogwai: If The Stars Had A Sound”, the first documentary on the band directed by long-time collaborator Antony Crook, and the sold-out Big City, the first festival curated by the group which took place this summer in their hometown of Glasgow. “God Gets You Back” is accompanied by a video directed and created by Hand Held Cine Club (Justin and James Lockey), which is practically a short. It has vivid and powerful photography. The piece is a well-calibrated return, a song that gives up on sitting on its laurels after the success of the official 2021 album, “As The Love Continues”which reached number one in the UK, and pursues a melancholy beauty, which also reverberates in the video.

Driven by an arpeggiated synth, “God Gets You Back” unfolds gracefullywith drummer Martin Bulloch providing assurance that the track continues to move forward with purpose, nearly seven minutes into the journey. Barry Burns decided that the song “It needed a melody or vocals, but I couldn’t find the lyrics, so I asked my 7 year old daughter to make some up, she did and I sang those words”. The song seems like the natural culmination of their work on soundtracks. It has great cinematic appeal. The 2025 tour features dates in Asia and North America, as well as a full leg in the UK and Europe. In Italy they played this summer in Agrigento and Bologna. On the world tour, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite explained: “We’re immensely excited to be heading out on our first world tour since the pandemic. We’ll be going to some amazing places and can’t wait to perform our new songs.” Mogwai formed in 1995 in Glasgow. The band consists of Stuart Braithwaite (guitar, vocals), Barry Burns (guitar, piano, synthesizer, vocals), Dominic Aitchison (bass) and Martin Bulloch (drums). Since 1997, the band has released ten studio albums, with the most recent, 2021’s “As The Love Continues,” which was a critical and commercial success. The group has also released several EPs and contributed to the soundtrack of projects for Amazon Prime and Apple TV+.

Mogwai founded the Glasgow-based independent record label Rock Action Records in 1996. Originally created to allow the band to release their own music, the label has grown from its origins to become a renowned and distributed international label, furthermore after 25 years it retains the ethos and independent spirit that define Mogwai as a band. Rock Action has been responsible for releasing music of a wide range of both local Glasgow and international artists, counting many critically acclaimed albums in its catalogue. The label’s recent output includes music from successful Scottish artists such as Arab Strap, The Twilight Sad, Kathryn Joseph and Mogwai themselvesas well as new names like Cloth, bdrmm and many others.