Hear Cut Glass Kings' heady psych of 'At The Borderline'
Scratched-lens 'rock and road' music meets woozy shoegaze-psych as Cut Glass Kings announce their new album with…
AT THE BORDERLINE
Long-running Birmingham duo cooks up 11 tracks of drifting and driving, multi-mood DIY indie
From A Distant Place to be released on Run On Records, home to The Coral, Royston Club and The Dream Machine
Cut Glass Kings – At The Borderline
OUT NOW on Run On Records
From the album, From A Distant Place
Released Fri 21 February 2025
** CLICK FOR VIDEO / AUDIO **
Conjuring mysterious magic in a Black Country cellar, the ways and means by which the sparkling, era-straddling music of Cut Glass Kings occurs to the Midlands-based duo is puzzled over on At The Borderline, the first single from their second, upcoming album. Locked in artistic simpatico for the past decade, Paul Cross and Greg McMurray announce the new 11-track album, From A Distant Place, for release on Run On Records on Fri 21 February 2025.
A lengthy, transformative five-year period since their release of their cult, self-titled debut album (in 2019 on The Coral leader, James Skelly’s own label) has found Cross and McMurray deep in introspective writing and analogue recording processes. Switched onto sounds from Eels to John Grant and Ty Segall to Timber Timbre, while still circling the totems of late-Beatles and Electric Warrior-era T-Rex, Cut Glass Kings paint with broad palette of heady, shoegazey psych and pummelling, glammy alt-rock.
The intimacy of the pair, both friends since school, concocting creatively and sharing the bruises of life in the studio and on the road, beats through At The Borderline as they puzzle over motivations, inspirations and the musical spark between them.
McMurray says: “This song is almost like the bridge from our first record to this one. It shares some of its DNA. I remember Paul sending me the voice note of the chorus and think it’s one of our best. “We’re the fuse to a fire we’ve never understood” is about the two of us making music. A lot of the lyrics on the album are about that.”
At The Borderline’s loud starting pistol sound of their album campaign getting underway isn’t the first that listeners have heard of Cut Glass Kings in 2024 as they have gone on a grassroots mission of gradually unveiling new work. Already this year they have hush-released the languid West Coast wig-out of Gift Horse, the light-touch glam of the Bolan-esque Thick As Thieves and the rewarding, slow-reveal, epic rainbow of ELO-adjacent sound, Flying Saucer.
Obsessives, documentarians and students of records, instruments and tapes, Cut Glass Kings’ album was mixed by James Skelly and Chris Taylor (The Coral, Blossoms, Courteeners) at Liverpool’s Kempston Street Studios, the successor to the legendary, now defunct Parr Street Studios. The album was finalised in that controlled environment after McMurray and Cross had self-recorded tracks using a vintage Tascam 388 tape machine, bought in a Devonian car park for cash, in their cellar studio.
From A Distant Place will be released on vinyl, CD as well as being made available on all streaming services.
Originally formed near Birmingham in the early 2010’s as a three-piece, Cut Glass Kings as a streamlined two-piece began their creative friendship with Skelly and the city of Liverpool following a gig at Seel Street’s Zanzibar in 2014. The title track of their debut EP, released on Skeleton Key Records in 2017, Shadow Of Your Love, has gone on to gather almost five million streams on Spotify.
For the most up-to-date information on Cut Glass Kings, including future releases and live announcements, connect with the band online at:
https://twitter.com/cutglasskings
https://www.facebook.com/cutglasskings
https://www.instagram.com/cutglasskings
