Arab Strap announce ninth album Half-Told Tales and share new single ‘You You You’

Arab Strap have announced their ninth studio album Half-Told Tales, due 4th September via Rock Action Records, alongside new single ‘You You You’.

The release arrives almost exactly thirty years to the day since the duo’s first single, ‘The First Big Weekend’, was released in autumn 1996. Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton marked the anniversary by wiping their social media accounts before confirming plans for new music and a UK headline tour. “We’re thirty years old this year,” the pair said. “So we decided to celebrate by doing what we enjoy most: by making new music.”

The follow-up to last year’s I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore was built, in Middleton’s own account, out of productive disagreement. “The excitement comes because me and Aidan like and hate different things,” he has said. “It’s not the one I wanted to make. I don’t think it’s what Aidan wanted to make either. It’s this bit in the middle. It might not be 100% what we want but it’s good for the band, and it works.”

‘You You You’ is the album’s opening salvo: harsh sonics, frisky beats and a vocal that Moffat has described as “a disco-metal incantation.” Its subject is more earnest than the description suggests. Moffat has said the track is “an attempt to remind ourselves, and hopefully others, that the world’s not full of awful people, that there are millions of us out there dealing with the same worries every day: from the rising costs of absolutely everything to the endless warping of reality.”

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A six-date UK tour follows the album’s release in October, ending at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom.

12 Oct – Whelan’s, Dublin

13 Oct – Band on the Wall, Manchester

14 Oct – Heaven, London

15 Oct – Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds

16 Oct – Georgian Theatre, Stockton

17 Oct – Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow

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