Richard Dawson announces new album, End of the Middle

“I think I know what’s happening in the song, but hopefully that’ll be different for each person listening,” Dawson says of the new single. “I like that the line ‘Out the gate and down the lane’ - it could mean going down the allotment, or it could mean going somewhere else. Tunnel is obviously a very loaded word. There’s possibly a lot of drama happening outside of the lines of the song…. Or not. It might just be a song about an allotment.”

The forthcoming release, End of the Middle, follows his 2022 album, The Ruby Cord, which was the final release in a trilogy that started with 2017's Peasant.

End of the Middle was partly inspired by his love of the films of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, the album focuses around a family unit. “It zooms in quite close-up to try and explore a typical middle class English family home,” Dawson says. “We're listening to the stories of people from three or four generations of perhaps the same family. But really, it’s about how we break certain cycles. I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally.”

To further hit home the significance of the title and this circular-cum-middle end point, the DomMart vinyl version of the album will be a reverse cut, playing from the middle outwards, the opposite direction to a standard LP.

Tracklist:

1. Bolt
2. Gondola
3. Bullies
4. The question
5. Boxing Day sales
6. Knot
7. Polytunnel
8. Removals van
9. More than Real