Echo & The Bunnymen: a new album is coming after 12 years. Listen to “Brussels Is Haunted”, first single from “Apples For Isaac”

46 years after their birth, Echo & The Bunnymen still have no intention of stopping. The historic Liverpool band has announced “Apples For Isaac”, the new album of unreleased songs out on September 18th for BMG. This is the first work composed of original material since “Meteorites”, published in 2014. “The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon” arrived in 2018, a collection of new recordings of songs from the past, but the new album represents the group's true creative return after over a decade.

Work on “Apples For Isaac” began shortly after the release of “The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon,” but several obstacles slowed its completion. Ian McCulloch explained to Mojo: “I think Covid had something to do with the delay. But I also wanted, lyrically, everything to make sense, or to be cryptically important. Which is an absurd phrase.” An expression, “cryptically important”, which however seems to perfectly summarize the dark, solemn and enigmatic aesthetic of Echo & The Bunnymen.
The first sessions took place at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool, which closed in 2020. Work then continued at Doghouse Studios in Henley, where the band also stayed during recording.
Clem Burke, legendary Blondie drummer who passed away in 2025, plays on almost all the songs. The album is dedicated to his memory.

The first single is “Brussels Is Haunted”, a song that Echo & The Bunnymen have been performing live for some years and in which the melancholic grandeur of their most classic production resurfaces.
McCulloch recounted the genesis of the song thus: “It started years ago. Brussels was a magical place, the first city abroad where the band played, in 1980. We were invited by the city's hippest scene. A friend of ours, Bert Bertrand, appears in the opening verse. He followed us everywhere together with Annik Honoré. He ended up committing suicide in New York. This thing continues to haunt me, and of course there's also Annik Honoré and the Ian Curtis story. There's a sense of absolute beauty, a kind of ancient sadness and perhaps an impending doom. And then Brussels as the center of European politics. All these things are encapsulated in one song, and it's strange how they finally linked together.” Listen to “Brussels Is Haunted” below.