Watch Simple Minds Talking About New "Razor Sharp" Album

The new album is receiving much praise from critics, with this Hot Press writer reckoning that 'Walk Between Worlds' with its eight tracks with a running time of 42 minutes is razor sharp like a pared down pencil and one of their best in yonks.
"We worked on two songs and, at first, it was looking like being more of the same. But, as we went on, and particularly after the acoustic tour, the album took on its own identity," says Jim.
"But the two main things are always the strength of the tunes and the words you build around them. In our early days, we didn’t really write songs. Like a lot of bands in the Eighties, we wrote big slabs of excitement. They weren’t songs in the sense that Bob Dylan or Neil Young write songs. We now know the importance of quality melodies and lyrics."
Here's the short commentary piece about the new album, which was put up on YouTube this morning.

Produced by the group with Andy Wright and Gavin Goldberg, both of whom worked on 'Big Music', the new album 'Walk Between Worlds', with its eight tracks rocketing past in 42 minutes, is a relatively concise affair.

It is also an album of two distinct sides, with side one tracks such as Summer and The Signal And The Noise revisiting the glassy guitars and new wave dance grooves of the post-punk era and the second half exploring more cinematic sounds, with the title track and Barrowland Star both featuring dramatic orchestrations recorded at Abbey Road.
"It’s very much an old-school album, with its two sides echoing the format of the vinyl LPs we grew up with," says Jim.

"The Euro-synths of the first side put me in mind of our early Eighties breakthrough albums like Empires And Dance and Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call. The second side, with its ‘big cinema’ sound, is more elegant and thematic. In the second half, we’re trying to open the songs up and give them greater musicality."

Walk Between Worlds' by Simple Minds and is out now on CD, vinyl, exclusive bundles and digital.