I Like Trains announce first album in eight years, share powerful new single

I Like Trains have announced details of their first new album in eight years, ‘Kompromat’, as well as releasing first single ‘The Truth’.

The Leeds band – made up of David Martin (vocals/guitar), Alistair Bowis (bass), Guy Bannister (guitar/synths), Simon Fogal (drums) and Ian Jarrold (guitar) – announced the follow-up to 2012’s ‘The Shallows’ today (May 6).

“This was one of the final tracks to come together for the album,” Martin said of new single ‘The Truth’. “It came from a list I was keeping over a number of months. I would follow the news and social media and add a line or two a day, so that it ended up plotting the news cycle over that period.

“The amount of information we’re fed on a daily basis is enormous. Everyone is so keen to ‘break’ the news as quickly as possible, that it becomes impossible to comprehend it, and draw a meaningful narrative through it. How does this event connect to that one? Who gains what because this happened? Who is missing out? It’s exhausting.”

The video for ‘The Truth’ includes digitally manipulated footage of Donald Trump mouthing the words, between a variety of scenes from archive footage. Watch the clip below.

Martin added that ‘Kompromat’ wasn’t intended to be “a record about current affairs,” but ended up being influenced by “Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica and covert Russian influence.” The album is due out August 21 via Crash Records.

In a four-star review of I Like Trains’ ‘The Shallows’, NME said: “Tomorrow’s world may be unforgiving – as on the world-weary ‘Beacons’ or fading pulsar-twitch of ‘We Used To Talk’ – but there’s little point in fretting; far better to warm yourself in the slow-burning embers of ‘The Turning Of The Bones’ and ‘Mnesoyme’, even as everything else crumbles away.”







‘Kompromat’ tracklist:

1. ‘A Steady Hand’
2. ‘Desire Is A Mess’
3. ‘Dig In’
4. ‘PRISM’
5. ‘Patience Is A Virtue’
6. ‘A Man Of Conviction’
7. ‘New Geography’
8. ‘The Truth’
9. ‘Eyes To The Left’ (feat. Anika)