Gintis return on May 27th with a new album Hope Is All We Have, their first in 11 years. One of the most striking tracks on the album ‘Buildings’ has a brand new video and God Is In The TV is delighted to bring you the exclusive premiere of the lead single for this extraordinary album.
The band’s frontman Carl Roberts shared more about the track, “The song is just about using a theme or a metaphor as a vehicle for expressing your feelings. It started with Joe using the metaphor to write the chorus “this is not a derelict house of a relationship it may just need a little paintwork”, which is such an easy metaphor for everyone to understand, and something everyone can relate to. Although the narrative breaks off for a second to directly ask whether “a good life will ever stop the darkness looming” which of course there will never be an answer to, so the following line of “I don’t know Joe, have a beer” is that very human understanding between two people. Like a lot of songs we write there is yearning to understand ourselves, to understand other people, and to be understood by other people.
In terms of the video, our friend Andy Pearson (Wild Kindness film productions) directed it, filmed it and produced it. It was all his idea. Using the metaphor of buildings and paintwork and running with it. So he got us all in to do some decorating. He had the idea that we would come in and strip a room, then start decorating it with the last shot being the sleeve of the new album being hung in a picture frame on the newly painted wall. I really like what Andy did with this, it was really all his idea – we just turned up in our scruffs and he told us what to do haha!”
The North Wales band who now mostly reside in Liverpool, have had several false starts when looking to release Hope Is All We Have. After the band’s spellbinding ‘Dennis/Oh, My Little Malcontent’ double A single for Popty Ping gained critical praise and BBC Radio play, the band looked set to trade in their cult status for much bigger things.
Tragedy undoubtedly played its part in delaying Hope Is All We Have‘s release in recent years with band members dealing with cruel losses at the same time. In early 2020, the band’s frontman Roberts lost his sister Laura – wife of guitarist Jools Neale. The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with Roberts and Neale providing end of life care for Gintis’s biggest champion as she battled breast cancer. Around the same time the brother of Gintis drummer Gaz Picket lost his life to cardio-myopathy. Understandably, work on the album was shelved.
Produced and mixed by former guitarist of The Coral and solo artist Bill Ryder-Jones at his own Yawn Studios in West Kirby, the album was finally concluded late in 2021 after a concerted effort from the eight members of the band to finish what they’d started. With help from Ryder-Jones and new label Mai 68 Records, Gintis have made an album full of leftfield indie pop that will resonate with fans of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Grandaddy and Pavement.
Watch the painting and decorating themed video for ‘Buildings’ below.
