Tindersticks are gearing up to release a new album, Distractions, via City Slang in February.

Today theyโ€™ve shared its first single, a cover of Television Personalitiesโ€™ โ€œYouโ€™ll Have To Scream Louderโ€ from their 1984 album The Painted Word. Listen below:

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โ€œLate May and early June 2020 was a twitchy and angry time for many of us,โ€ says Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples. โ€œThere was a growing agitation inside of me. I woke on a Saturday morning with no plans but just this Television Personalities song going round in my head, it pushed me into the studio. 4 or 5 hours later I had made the basis of this recording, though I had to wait for windows of opportunity within our confinement to work with the band to bring it to a conclusion.

โ€œI have loved the TVPs since buying the Bill Grundy e.p. with its photocopied sleeve on one of my regular after school bus trips to the Virgin record shop in a basement on King Street, Nottingham. Some years later, 1984, I was living around the corner on the 17th floor of Victoria Centre flats, they swayed in the wind. I was working a few days at a local record shop and The Painted Word was released. It became at the soundtrack to that semi-slum, those times. I was 19.

โ€œTo be young in the early 1980s there was much to be angry about, battles to be fought โ€“ Thatcher, racial and gender injustice โ€“ and (one of the motivations for this song) nuclear disarmament. Although we may not have thought those battles were ever won, we believed we had helped push things in a different direction, that changes were made.

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โ€œIn the Spring of 2020 we were shown painfully that these battles are ongoing.โ€