First album by legendary Glasgow group The Yummy Fur in 27 years!

Limited INDIES ONLY 180g blue sunshine vinyl (transparent light blue and transparent yellow vinyl). Non-Returnable.

Limited 180gm Black Vinyl + Limited mini-gatefold CD.

The Yummy Furs first album of new material in over 25 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The bands original incarnation fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeowns life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding.

Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light.

The album begins with Cogs, a taunting inquisition from within. As McKeown stages a fight between his id and ego, the tension heats up between conversational guitar lines and minimalist repetition; threatening sing-song melody and real, palpable menace. The band members are forced in tandem only to break apart, sustaining a genuine sense of just-hidden danger throughout the whole record except, arguably, Headphones, a looser moment which sees McKeown make an existential something out of nothing while waiting for someone in the car (I should have brought a book.../My ears are bleeding from the compression on your album)

The songs are riots of reference: Unity Over Europe is a slyly complex two act play about the Mitford sisters Diana, Unity, and Nancy, in a wink to the YF canon smashing tragic biographical detail together with allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Francis Bacon. Pynchon is also lifted to serve Blue Sunshine, a collision of school shooters, serial killers and fictional fuck-ups (Fast forward to Compton/Fast forward to Pynchon/Fast forward to Columbine') whose buzzy guitar lines are taunting and confrontational like a smarmy teenager. The innocuous title of My Lasagne belies a song that exists in several time periods at once: a visit to see Guernica, 50 people with their backs to the portrait of Dora Maar; the time that Picasso painted from; the Reina Sofia and the dirty streets of the Malasaa; myth-making musicians and the myths theyre riffing off overlapping and leering at each other.

All this could be laboured in lesser hands, but cultural verbosity is second nature to The Yummy Fur, who transform all this source material into songs that are weird, sexy, funny and absurd. Meaning is not happily understood or flattened. Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation accompanied McKeown as he wrote this album, and shes paraphrased in Semolina Ballerina, the albums justification of artistic ambiguity. Thomsons motorik beat leads a gathering of back-and-forth instrumental phrases including a wiry contribution on saxophone embodying the futility of trying to parse something definitive from repeated action. Listen to the very first thing thats in your head, Sontag-via-McKeown commands directly, then slinks sideways: Interpretation is a conversation in an unmade bed

The album features two more focused portraits, or at least The Yummy Furs version of such a thing. Wanda merges the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden and the title character of her semi-autobiographical 1970 feature film, with Lodens then-husband Elia Kazan joining the fray of no-good men in her film. Its a mix of adaptation and avant-criticism, with McKeowns wordplay and mannered pronunciation mirroring the way that non-fiction and fiction twist around each other in the song. The title track is a series of vignettes and impressions from the lives of the bands 90s inner circle, positing painter Mac McNaughton as a kind of Falstaffian ringleader. As with Piggy Wings and the recent single New T-Shirt, McNaughton painted the cover of Everybody Talks About The Weather like the albums music, the image of a coy girl in a white dress is an uncanny amalgamation of styles, suggestions and references just out of reach, as though seen in an art museum in a dream.

The album ends with two reads of the same frustration. King of Nothing is the closest The Yummy Fur will ever get to sludge-rock: the band melts together into a dusty, dreary haze as McKeown drowns in a drudgery of personal struggle (Two jumpers on in Babylon/And only cats to talk to) and the rhythmic toppling of heroes (Rowlands, Duvall, Munro). The majority of visible dirt is cleaned off for Say Hello, an uncharacteristic depiction of throwing the windows open after a dark night of the soul. Here, the situation is still cold and hard (When the sun burns gold, but the heat never reaches your fingertips) but it feels surmountable. Everybody Talks About The Weather is an unpredictable album from an unpredictable group, but ending on a moment of almost uncomplicated light is maybe its biggest surprise. - Claire Biddles (2026)