Elbow return with their tenth studio album, ‘AUDIO VERTIGO’. Recorded throughout 2023 at the band’s individual studios, Migration Studios, Gloucestershire, and finalised at the band’s facility at Blueprint Studios, Salford, the album marks a significant step change for the group following 2021’s ‘Flying Dream 1’.

In the words of lead singer and lyricist Guy Garvey, ‘AUDIO VERTIGO’ was built from ‘gnarly, seedy grooves created by us playing together in garagey rooms’ and is both more direct and sonically varied by purpose that its predecessor.

Characterised by the band as an album heavy on stomp, swing, and infectious oil-can funk beats, ‘AUDIO VERTIGO’ sees elbow on the front foot, fusing their love of varied and various styles on a collection that ranges from the Beastie Boys meets Bonham breaks of opener ‘Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years’, through the ‘theme for a futuristic cop show’, (Guy again), of lead single ‘Lover’s Leap’ to the infectiously funky ‘Balu’.

The wide screen ambition doesn’t end with the music. Guy delivers a lyrical sweep on the album that considers our obsession with star crossed lovers, admonishes, and forgives his self-delusion, puzzles the nature of loss in a digital age, and narrates a real-life knife fight, all the while finding friends, real and imagined, and experiences, genuine and mythical, along the way. Long a fan of Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’, the lyrics of ‘AUDIO VERTIGO’ match that program’s scale and scope in their ambition and their execution, including surely the only recorded presence of the Chandrasekhar Limit in a pop song in ‘Knife Fight’.