Album Review: Ride - Interplay

It has been a decade since Ride re-commissioned their guitars, meaning the Oxford quartet are now making music for longer in the 21st century than in their original iteration, which lasted from 1988 to 1996.  Interplay, their seventh studio album, is certainly the sound of a band comfortable in their skin.

The musical world has turned numerous times since Ride V.1 marked the heyday of shoegaze. However, the genre is now firmly back in fashion, and gaining fans who were but a glint in their parents’ eyes when Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt began pressing their distortion pedals.

Their trademark swirling guitars are present and correct, often overlaid atop toe-tappingly catchy melodies, as on recent single and album opener ‘Peace Sign’, the galloping ‘Monaco’ and the strident ‘Midnight Rider’. Other highlights include the cascading ‘Portland Rocks’, and the soaring ‘Last Night I Came Somewhere To Dream’, where the guitars jangle rather than assault the eardrums.

The seven-minute ‘Essaouira’ is a hypnotic, Stone Roses-style shuffle over a gentle electronic backdrop and syncopated polyrhythm, while ‘Light In A Quiet Room’ is a song of two halves. The first is a gentle, tender rumination, while the second is a cacophony of distortion, with guitars crashing, cymbals bashing, bass pulsing and everybody generally making as much of a racket as they can. A welcome return.

8/10

• Interplay is out today March 29

Read this review and more in the latest issue of Hot Press.