Last month, Hundred Reasons announced that their first album together in 15
years, Glorious Sunset, is due for release on 24th Feb 2023 via SO Recordings. Sharing the lead single and title track ‘Glorious Sunset’, the response was ecstatic from fans and press alike.
Following this week’s announcement that the band would be Special Guests at 2000 Trees in 2023, the band share the grit and melody of “New Glasses”, the second single from their much-anticipated new album. Anthemic and direct, “New Glasses” was one of the last songs to be written and recorded for the album and vocalist Colin Doran had the following to say about the themes behind the track:
“The lyrics for this song are really about a person I used to work with that spent lots of time treating people badly to cover up their own inadequacies. They were not good at their job but, due to their massive ego and how they wished to be perceived by others, preferred to make others feel deficient. The song describes how I came to realise this. The amusing thing is that it was a working title as when we started writing it, Larry had actually got new glasses that day but the name stuck.”
As well as the new music and festival news, Hundred Reasons also announced the release of an official podcast this month, entitled Live Fast, Die Ugly: The Hundred Reasons Podcast put together by Tom Kwei. The four-part podcast series chronicles the band in their own words.
From their first ever performance at Kingston’s The Peel on Jan 22nd 2000 all the way up to their upcoming 2023 reunion shows across the UK and new album, Live Fast, Die Ugly covers everything anyone could ever want to know about one of the UK’s all-time unsung juggernauts: the global tours, the fiercely loyal fanbase, the top 10 album chart breakthrough, the anomalous Top Of The Pops appearances, the disbandment, the reunion and everything in between.
Colin had the following to say about the podcast:
“Tom Kwei came to us with the idea as a massive fan and we’re pretty sure he knows more than we do about the band, so it was a no-brainer saying yes and going ahead with it. We never considered ourselves the most exciting band in the world but turns out we actually have quite the story to tell.”
Live Fast, Die Ugly’s second episode Avalanche is out today and available to stream now HERE
Hundred Reasons have also celebrated both past and future, new label SO Recordings partnering up with the band’s first, Fierce Panda, to announce a limited edition 7″ that pairs the title track on the A-side to a reissue of early favourite “Cerebra” on the B.
Vocalist Colin Doran had the following to say about the track:
“This is the first song we ever wrote together so brings back a ton of memories. It was amazing when Fierce Panda came to us with the idea of re-releasing it with the song Glorious Sunset. For us, it’s like things have come full circle.”
The path to the first Hundred Reasons album in a decade and a half may well have taken many detours for the Aldershot quartet as lives, roles and responsibilities diverged but ultimately their route back to one another came as something of a natural process.
The creative urge seemingly never left the band – Colin Doran (vocals), Larry Hibbitt (guitar, vocals), Andy Gilmour (bass), Andy Bews (drums) – and their first sessions back together became less about re-capturing the magic of their previous four studio albums, or addressing unfinished business, and more satisfying a growing urge to be creative together once more. They set about fanning the flame of a spark that was never truly extinguished, aiming to capture spontaneity in its rawest form, and later hone and perfect their work with the band’s own Larry Hibbitt on production duties.
Consequently, Glorious Sunset is as vivid, exciting and as fresh a collection as they have ever produced – distinctly Hundred Reasons and full of fire. Lead singer Colin Doran says of the first writing session; “I came away from that session not just feeling closer to the other guys, having not seen them for some time, but thinking the music was f****** awesome. We all looked at each other and knew it was a go.”
“This album isn’t something we felt we had to do. We simply arrived at a position where the music was so good that it was something we needed to do.”
