Maxïmo Park are today sharing new single “The End Can Be As Good As The Start”. It’s the latest new music to be taken from the band’s forthcoming album Stream Of Life, which lands on September 27 via Lower Third.
Last month the band began to introduce the new album with the lean and direct single “Your Own Worst Enemy“, which zeroed in on the cyclical nature of mistake making. New cut “The End Can Be As Good As The Start” sees them soar in the slipstream of brisk power-pop while considering what it takes to preserve belief in the future.
Lead singer Paul Smith had the following to say about the new single: “It’s an exuberant New Wave-y alt-pop-rocker about faith, solidarity and sustaining relationships in the face of society’s structural hurdles.”
The road to Stream Of Life saw the band link up once again with Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective), Grammy-winning producer of 2021’s UK #2 charting, pandemic-era tour de force Nature Always Wins, as well as producer Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, Julia Jacklin, Sports Team). As a result, it marks the first time they have all been together in a studio to make an album since 2016.
It finds the band in perhaps the most reflective state they’ve been in. Lead singer Paul Smith, this most lit-pop of lyric writers, took the album title from a short story by Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, inspired by both its stream of consciousness style and the way it prompts reflection on the inner mechanisms of people’s minds. It begs the question of why they do the things that they do, even when they can seem counterintuitive to the outsider. There’s an inner flow to every individual – a stream of life.
Both form and concept bleed satisfyingly into how Stream Of Life itself was created – recorded quickly, making fast decisions, not overly-editing oneself – and more specifically how “Your Own Worst Enemy” becomes a study in deception. It considers the things we conceal from ourselves, and others, in order to maintain some inner equilibrium.
Commenting on the single, lead singer Paul Smith says: “’Your Own Worst Enemy’ has a different feel to anything we’ve done before – loose and lean, yet still rocking! It’s about that horrible feeling where you suddenly realise you’ve made a familiar error, and also the lies we tell each other on a daily basis to avoid confrontation or turmoil.”
Continuing about the album he says: “We’ve always tried to document the world around us at each stage of our lives while subtly nudging the music forward each time – this record continues that mission. It was great to be back in a studio after recording remotely last time. Working with Ben in Atlanta, and Burke in Byker, was as stimulating as it’s ever been, and I think we captured that energy. Thematically, the record covers passion, politics, and privilege amongst other topics.”
