STARSAILOR return with Where The Wild Things Grow, their first album in six years, produced by Rick McNamara, and set for release on 22nd March 2024. Today, they release the sublime title track, giving fans a long anticipated taste of what’s to come. 

“I wrote it in my old flat at night,” says Walsh of the title track, which has that slightly uneasy, otherworldliness reminiscent of those early Bowie or Pink Floyd recordings. “I could hear the pipes creaking. I was thinking of Maurice Sendak and Stanley Donwood’s Radiohead art. There’s an early Ed Harcourt song called ‘Beneath The Heart Of Darkness’ that’s an influence too. The brooding otherworldly darkness.”

Where The Wild Things Grow – the album – features additional guitar work Tony “Doggen” Foster from Rick McNamara and Travis’s Andy Dunlop, as well as backing vocals by Lucy Joules (Sam Smith).  Rick, himself, who produced the album, is now unofficially ‘the fifth Starsailor’, or, as Walsh puts it, “another creative in the room who really cares about the songs and pushes us to our limits.” 

Over the past two decades, Starsailor have been compared to everyone from Neil Young and Van Morrison, to Wigan compatriots, The Verve – Walsh cites the latter’s homecoming show in front of 33,000 people at Haigh Hall on 24th May 1998 as a revelatory experience – although, concurrently, perhaps we should add Tim and Jeff Buckley, as well as Arcade Fire to that increasingly debatable list. Whatever your pronouncements on the matter, one thing’s for sure: Where The Wild Things Grow bears up to candid analysis, repeat listens proving it to reveal layer upon layer of casual observations and quiet reflections on life being loved, and love being lived. It’s also an album that has no right to be as good as it is – and yet here it is.