Pixies

2024 is a momentous year for Pixies.  Thirty-five years since the groundbreaking Platinum-certified album Doolittle catapulted the band into the UK Top Ten, and 20 years after their celebrated reformation at Coachella, Pixies are deep into their second act. Bigger than ever, playing to fans spanning multiple generations and in the midst of their most creative purple patch. A brand new album - titled The Night the Zombies Came - marks the group’s tenth studio record (if you count 1987’s Come On Pilgrim). 13 new songs that will arrive aptly in time for Halloween amongst a 2024 touring schedule taking in circa 70 shows across the globe - and even more to be announced in 2025.

Spend an hour or two in the company of Charles Thompson IV, and the conversation will soon fall to zombies, bog people, Druidism, medieval theme restaurants, shopping malls, the Masons, surf rock and the practice of slaughtering lambs in Monmouthshire. Along the way, he might take in Shirley Collins, the distinctive dry drum sound of 1970s’ Fleetwood Mac, and the sestina, a poetic form attributed to the 12th century Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel.

Out of such disparate wonders are Pixies’ albums made. “Fragments that are related,” as Thompson (better known as Black Francis) puts it. “And juxtaposed with other fragments in other songs. And in a collection of songs in a so-called LP, you end up making a kind of movie.”

Since their earliest days in late '80s Massachusetts, and on past their 2004 reformation, Pixies have worked this way — proclaiming their love for both Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary, relishing both loud and quiet, singing somewhat kaleidoscopically of reincarnation, scuba diving, Luis Buñuel, necromancy, Samson and Delilah and the 1986 comedy-drama, Crimes of the Heart. From the start, their music has been imagistic, contradictory, electrifying. They stand as one of the most influential, revered, and deeply adored bands of all time.

The juxtaposed fragments that make up this year’s The Night the Zombies Came are perhaps the most cinematic of their career — gothic meets sci-fi shlock, horror flicks, dark folk tales, and Ennio Morricone westerns.

Early on, the band noticed the songs were dividing into two camps: what they came to call the ‘Dust Bowl Songs’ — country-tinged, ballad-esque numbers such as “Primrose” and “Mercy Me,” and on the other side, the album’s furious punk numbers such as “You’re So Impatient” and “Chicken.” Only "Jane (the Night the Zombies Came)" keeps its feet in both camps — reminiscent of early '60s Phil Spector, the band hitting the sweet spot between mushy and abrasive, it’s a track that Thompson allegedly likened to being chased by a swarm of bees.

For this outing, the band returned to work with producer Tom Dalgety, who has steered Pixies since 2016’s Head Carrier and on through 2019’s Beneath the Eyrie and 2022’s Doggerel, and whom Thompson refers to as “a good master of a lot of information” and drummer David Lovering calls “a fifth Pixie now.”

Over the course of the last three records, they have established a rhythm with Dalgety: the producer heading to Thompson’s house in Massachusetts a week before recording to familiarise himself with the new songs, sitting in his front room with a laptop, while the singer strums out a few ideas. “I really love that process,” Dalgety says. “From a professional, productive side of things it’s really nice to get to know the songs and experiment. But also from a geeky fan point of view it’s quite cool being sat on the sofa and seeing ten Pixies songs just suddenly unfold in front of you.”

From there, the band reconvened once again at Guilford Sound studio in Vermont, sharing a house together, rehearsing in the living room, walking through the autumn woods each day to the studio to record. The hours were not relentless. When the sun went down, Thompson notes, they could still go howl at the moon.

But they used their time wisely and often experimentally. For several records now, Thompson has been chasing a different sound for the drums — not the expansive boom of the expensive studio live room with its perfect acoustics and high-end microphones, but something deader and drier and more akin to the records he loved from the early 1970s.

For a couple of Zombies’ tracks — “Chicken” and “Mercy Me,” Lovering and Dalgety relented. The producer set up a small drum kit in a small room, deadened the drum skins with cloth and gaffer tape. “And they stuff David in there,” recalls Thompson. “And you know, climbing in and out of it is sort of like climbing in and out of a fish aquarium. And it probably gets warm in there. So I'm sure that he suffered for my dry drum sound. I don't know if there was blood, but there was definitely a lot of sweat. And maybe some tears.”

Lovering is diplomatic. “Compact would be the word for it,” he says. “Everything was just nice and muffled the way I like to hear it. And if you listen now, it is concise, you hear the drums much more, they’re not as open and brash or arena style. They’re just right there, and it makes for a different kind of sound.”

There were other changes, too. A line-up shift has brought in bassist Emma Richardson (Band of Skulls), and with it, a different quality to the band’s sound. Thompson praises the restrained elegance of her voice. Dalgety speaks of her “fantastic creative vibe”. Lovering describes her as “a consummate bass player.”

The recent tour, of which Richardson was a part, was particularly joyful for the drummer. “I think the response to these shows and the way that we’ve been playing is because of the rhythm section,” he says. “Of course I’m up there, but Emma is up there with me. And when the rhythm section is locked on, and laying it down with power, Joe and Charles can screw off as much as they want. She’s just killing it.”

For Richardson, the invitation to join Pixies was a huge and unexpected compliment. She spent weeks exploring the band’s back catalogue ahead of the live shows, trying to understand their magic.“They have this amazing way of making something that is quite a complicated arrangement sound really effortless and very succinct,” she says. “But actually when you’re picking it apart as a musician you realise all the tricks that they use. How cleverly they form songs and structures and lyrics.”

The new record is particularly special to her. “It’s incredible. It feels slightly different from anything they’ve done before. It’s got this brilliant mixture of a knowing nostalgia and a punk, energetic, fun element. But it’s got this dark underbelly, and an almost romantic longing feel to it. They’ve created these little worlds which are quite cerebral and dreamlike, but it's also got these big vistas. It’s quite cinematic.”

Zombies also marks an expanded role for guitarist Joey Santiago. The track "I Hear You Mary" began as an instrumental he wrote for the previous album, and having also contributed his first lyrics on Doggerel, on this record, Thompson set Santiago the task of writing the words to Hypnotised by completing a sestina — a lyrical riddle of sorts, formed of six stanzas of six lines, in which words are rotated in a set pattern. Santiago, startled by the responsibility, set about labouring over a complex set of lyrics before coming to a realisation: “The truth of the matter is you’re just putting fucking words together. The lesson is just not to be precious. Just fucking do it.”

In recent years, Santiago has also sought to learn more about guitar playing — aware, he says, that it might help conquer his long-running imposter syndrome. “I was afraid, kinda, that I was going to lose my identity if I started studying it, but it made my studio experience a lot easier,” he says. For months, he found himself following the YouTube algorithm as it guided him through intensive tutorials. “Every musician will tell you that it’s a never ending thing,” he says. “It’s pretty remarkable that there are 12 notes and there are still possibilities out there.”

Lovering, too, has been deep in pursuit of self-improvement. “I find that the only time I get better or change or learn new things is just by playing and playing and playing,” he says. “It’s taken me 50 years to learn how to play the drums, and I mean that honestly. In the last year I’ve learned the way to play off my right hand — I never did that in the past, I was lazy as hell! And everything is like a clock now. So I’m excited not only with what we did with the record, but for upcoming stuff. We’re going to sound good!”

Back in the company of Thompson, the conversation has moved on to headless chickens, gargoyles, the lingering presence of the undead. “When we’re putting together a record,” he says, “we’re not trying to make it fit around a particular theme, but there may be a couple of catchphrases or words or concepts that are kicked around. On this particular record, I would say it would be ‘zombies’. Though it’s not in every song, and it’s not necessarily presented in a literal way.”

On every album they’ve ever made, Pixies have taken the record’s title from the lyrics — a song title, or a line. For a time, Thompson says, he struggled to find a title for this new collection of songs. “The only phrase that seemed to sound good to me is this one. Everything else seemed too goofy. You would think The Night the Zombies Came would be the most goofy-sounding, but to my ear, and to Tom’s also and to the rest of the band, it felt like ‘Oh, yeah, The Night the Zombies Came. That’s it. Of course.”