Primal Scream and Savages singers collaborate on new album

Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie has teamed up with solo artist and Savages vocalist Jehnny Beth to release the collaborative album Utopian Ashes, due July 2 via Third Man Records.

The album's lead single is "Remember We Were Lovers" with an official video by Douglas Hart (The Horrors, Paul Weller). Listen HERE and watch the video HERE. Vinyl will be available in the U.S. shortly after the album's worldwide release. Pre-orders will be available soon.

Utopian Ashes explores the loss, miscommunication and emotional inarticulacy that a married couple experience as they realize that their relationship is breaking down. The collection draws on the tradition of country soul classics, such as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s "Grievous Angel" and George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s "We Go Together." While it’s not autobiographical, it channels heartfelt truth from the songwriters’ own experiences.

Besides Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth, the album features Johnny Hostile (bass) alongside Primal Scream trio Andrew Innes (guitar), Martin Duffy (piano) and Darrin Mooney (drums).

“In the same way you create characters for a novel, we’ve created characters here,” says Jehnny Beth. “But you put yourself in it, because you’re trying to understand the human situation. The singing has to be authentic. That’s all that matters.”

“When you write a song you marry the personal with the fictional and make art,” adds Gillespie. “I was thinking about two people living alone, together but apart, existing and suffering in a psychic malaise, who plough on because of responsibilities and commitments. It’s about the impermanence of everything — an existential fact that everyone has to face at some point in their lives."

They first met in 2015, when they were both invited to perform with Suicide at the Barbican. The following summer she joined Primal Scream on stage for a duet of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’, which cemented their connection. In 2017, they convened in Paris for sessions, accompanied by Beth’s musical partner Johnny Hostile and the rest of Primal Scream.

Gillespie explains, ‘I wanted to put pain back into music. I wasn’t hearing a lot of it in modern rock music”.

Track list:

1. Chase It Down
2. English Town
3. Remember We Were Lovers
4. Your Heart Will Aways Be Broken
5. Stones of Silence
6. You Don't Know What Love Is
7. Self-Crowned King of Nothingness
8. You Can Trust Me Now
9. Living A Lie
10. Sunk In Reverie