The Apartments Peter Milton Walsh COLOUR ╕ Bleddyn Butcher 2020

Australia's The Apartments prep first LP in 5 years (listen to “Pocketful of Sunshine”)

The Apartments Peter Milton Walsh COLOUR ╕ Bleddyn Butcher 2020

Australian band The Apartments have been making wonderful orch-pop, off and on, since 1978, with Peter Milton Walsh’s songs and voice always at the forefront. The group are probably best known in North America for “The Shyest Time” which was on the soundtrack for John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful, and their song “Mr Somewhere” was covered by This Mortal Coil on their 1991 album Blood. (Walsh was also, briefly, an early member of The Go-Betweens.) After a decade-long hiatus, Walsh reactivated the band and released the excellent No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal in 2015. Five years on Walsh is back with The Apartments’ seventh album, In and Out of the Light, which will be out September 17 via Talitres, and features frequent collaborators Chris Abrahams from The Necks on piano and Miro Bukovsky on trumpet and flugelhorn.

We’ve got the premiere of the album’s first single, “Pocketful of Sunshine,” where Walsh’s delicate acoustic guitar is colored in with warm trumpet and backing vocals. “After a show in Paris I got talking to someone who told me that Apartments songs had helped them through a hard time,” Walsh says of the song’s origin. “That immediately interested me. While I’m drawn to all kinds of stories, I’ve always been interested in how people get themselves into trouble and out of it. How they deal. For some people an event—death, divorce, the unexpected ending of something—has completely upturned their world. Life has thrown everything at them, and nothing is what it used to be. Yet they kept going. I was thinking about this when I was writing ‘Pocketful of Sunshine.’ About what gets you through when things go wrong, what can lift you up, out of a world of trouble into the light.”

Listen to “Pocketful of Sunshine,” and check out the album art and tracklist, below.

apartments- in and out of the light

In And Out of the Light tracklist:
01 Pocketful of Sunshine
02 Write Your Way Out of Town
03 Where You Used to Be
04 What’s Beauty to Do
05 Butterfly Kiss
06 We Talked Through Till Dawn
07 I Don’t Give a Fuck About You Anymore
08 The Fading Light