Occasionally there have been pieces on this site reflecting on previous Soft Riot releases, often a good number of years after they’ve been released. The last such piece was for 2018’s The Outsider In The Mirrors, which was a transitional record that for me has its pros and cons and sort of fell through the cracks for me in some ways. I only really play one track off that album live now. It’s interesting what tracks from older albums still make it out into current live performances these days.
Overall the year 2025 — the current year that we’re in that’s very soon to be wrapping up — has been a bit of a year of re-consideration and analysis for this whole, um, project. I think this is natural, especially as things are nearing the 15th anniversary of the very first Soft Riot release, with the original No Longer Stranger EP which was re-packaged up with two extra tracks for an LP release on the San Diego (USA) based label Volar Records a year or so later.
The project had a totally different modus operandi back then — something I’ve mentioned numerous times — being more of a release to tie up some loose ends on various musical experiments I had been doing for years prior and at that point was coming from the point of being more low key, psychedelic electronic music perhaps more informed by film soundtracks and komische music more than anything. It would be in the years to follow where the whole purpose of Soft Riot changed, steering the music and the live performance style into what it would become up until today.
Earlier this year the wheels came off the “momentum wagon” a bit. There were any given things that just weren’t getting traction — or working, with a lot of those issues falling square on my shoulders. There’s many other things going on in my life, including running a graphic design business that in more recent years has become more “successful” (read: busy!). Plus I always have felt like a musical outsider in the underground synth scene, especially in more recent years as the overall scene morphs into what’s popular in terms of sound, image, etc. I felt a lot of what is going on in the scene a bit commidified and a lot of it didn’t interest me. Plus in order for me to get behind something, I had to 100% feel the power of whatever music I was putting out and I can be one picky, self-critical bastard.
For me music as always been a work in progress, and to challenge what one has already done, how to try new things and an overarching mission to continually improve and fine-tune the craft. And sometimes you need to lay off the accelerator a bit and think things out and wait for the wave of inspiration. I could step in that mindset when the time was right — and was far easier to do when I had far less other things I was trying to juggle in my life. I was lucky and my brain sort of dived into it, especially this past winter of 2024-2025.
So, where was I going with this…
When Push Comes To Shove is the seventh official album, released in November of 2019. In retrospect it came out quite quickly after its predecesor, The Outsider In The Mirrors. The date marks on the album — 2018 and 2019 — actually kind of shock me to this day when I look at them as I couldn’t conceive of writing two “official” albums in quick succession and that close to each other, but the reality is there was a 20 month gap between the two.
I then thought about although that album is a relatively newer one, most of the songs were written 6-7 years ago, which is almost half the somewhat steady time I’ve been doing this project for — that being around 14-15 years. A lot has changed since then — in the world, musically, my outlook, what I’m into and my life in general!
As a new album comes close to completion, and that being an album I’m very happy about*, I find myself looking back at both When Push Comes To Shove and the more recently released 2023 album No. as two albums in one chapter of the journey. First off, they’re visually similar as artwork is concerned, both moving into a more cleaner, less collage-based psychedelic of artwork of albums that came before them. From a production standpoint they’re also very similar as well — both having benefitted from myself getting into a groove of comfortably handling the production to get the sonic results I was looking for, given the limitations of the studio equipment I had to work with. No., being the following album, even expanded on those production techniques.
There is a major different between the two however, and that is that When Push Comes To Shove was written in a focussed mindset, constructing the songs with an album in mind and the writing of the tracks was sort of informed by the others that were developing for the album. A track like “Taking Off The Edge” (also released as a single preceding the album containing two non-album tracks) was an exercise in fractured, angular cautious optimism followed by the galloping drive of “It’s No Laughing Matter”.
“The Lost Weekend” is probably the most classic sounding synth pop track on the album, inspired by late night gathering of friends that breaks up that atmosphere of feeling alone. “Fate’s Got A Bone To Pick With You” darkens and adds a meaty weight to the album tone, with a bass synth based on two different pitched oscillators that I still am happy with its outcome to this day.
“By The Skin Of Your Teeth” was a bit more of an EBM workout that has somehow dropped out of live performances — likely due to myself preferring the feeling of how other tracks of mine are played live — but probably should come back into the set, albeit with some re-tweaking, as it was one that always when over well live. This track carried over the science fiction thematic approach that was more prevalent on earlier albums — a song about an alien coming to our planet and being seduced by it’s counter-culture, music and the human condition that accompanies that.
“Don’t Get Yourself Bent Out Of Shape” is a bit of an off-kilter italo-influenced number with a triplet swing that still gets included in most live performances to this day. “Heads Turn Around” rides on a fast, dark tempo before opening up into more melody in the choruses. Closing out the album is “Your Work Is Never Done”, which is essentially a reworked old demo from a band I played in called Savage Furs (2009-2011) that was languishing in the archives so I thought it’d be a nice one to bring back from the dead. Like most albums I’ve done there’s usually one track off of each that addresses some aspect — or struggle — with the creative process.
In addition to the tracks themselves there was a lot of energy put into the three promo videos for this album. There’s the digital-meets-analogue cut and paste collage of the video for “Taking Off The Edge” as well as all the time spent building a rather ramshackle miniature cityscape using foam board, models, fog and lighting for the dark and neon video for “Fate’s Got A Bone To Pick With You”. Using footage from a live performance in Hamburg in autumn 2019, the footage from that show was run through an analogue video synth for the video for “By The Skin Of Your Teeth”. All three of these videos were done in collaboration with Glasgow video artist Georgina Penstkart as Flustervision.
No. on the other hand came from a very different approach, with the majority of the tracks on that album being experiments written during the lockdown years of COVID, when the state of the world, performing live and how people might consume albums in the future was very uncertain. Strange to think of that now that thinks in a way have returned to normal (well, not quite). Tracks like “Crashing Into Tomorrow” and “Just A Vapour” were very much trying things out in the studio to see what might happen.
Although naturally the older albums from the early days of Soft Riot are indeed more alien to me now, there’s also something sort of alien about No. for these very reasons mentioned above.
Where No. has some really strong material that I like and might be more of a more unique artistic statement, I feel that When Push Comes To Shove is perhaps a more consistent listen and keeps more momentum and pace. I’m not one to listen back to previous albums I’ve released very often, but when I came back to When Push Comes To Shove for this piece, there’s a more consistent delivery of “bangers” there.
And going waaaay back to an old band I was in called Radio Berlin (1998-2005), this is a similar feeling I felt about that group’s final two LPs, 2001’s The Selection Drone and the final album from that band, 2003’s Glass. With over twenty years of hindsight they were both great but ultimately I felt The Selection Drone had more consistency in terms of the flow of the album and keeping up some sort of energy, despite the fact that Glass had notably better vocal performances, overall quality of sound and strength in arrangements in some songs.
All of these above are sort of behind me now at this point. With a gap of around three and a half years since the completion of the previous album No., I feel like a lot of things have changed and I was looking for some new songs to reflect where my head is at the moment. There’s a whole new album almost ready to go that I feel far more attached to than the others, as it was written in a completely different frame of mind and feeling more representative of where my head is at these days.
In fact, in about twelve hours I start my journey to southern France to mix the new album with my old friend Owen Pratt who now co-runs the production team Shepardtone. This is the first time in ten years I’ve gotten someone else on board to bring the songs together and coincidentally that album — You Never Know What Might Come Next from 2015 — had Owen on board as well. I’m there for a week and am really enthused about what will come out of the sessions there. You’ll hear about it soon enough!