Bunnymen set release-day signing as new album lands

Echo & the Bunnymen’s first album of new material in twelve years arrives on 18 September via BMG, and the dates around it form a clear home?city run. On the same day Ian McCulloch holds a ticketed signing at Jacaranda Baltic in Liverpool; the band posted the event on 1 September. Two nights later they play Camp and Furnace in the city, before a pair of London dates and a winter stand in Glasgow.

The London shows fall at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre on 22 and 23 September; the second night was added after the first sold out. Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow then hosts the band on 20 and 22 December. Taken together, the dates turn the release from a catalogue event into a short autumn and winter run that begins on Merseyside and ends on the Barrowland floor.

Burke’s last sessions

The eleven?track record features drums by the late Clem Burke on ten songs. The band said he was “integral to the making of the album and heartbreakingly passed away during its completion… love you Clem X”. That credit frames the album as a finished set of new Bunnymen songs carrying the final studio work of a drummer whose touch is already familiar to anyone who has followed British and American alternative rock across four decades.

Lead single Brussels Is Haunted received early radio play. Follow-up The Light That Surrounds You became available to stream on 18 August, with Take Me By The Hand also promoted ahead of the full release. The running order is Take Me By The Hand, Can’t Be Sold, Brussels Is Haunted, I’ll Be Your Sunshine, Hijacked, The Honey, Unstoppable Force, The Light That Surrounds You, Lab Rats Ran, Asimov and We Prayed In The Dark. The album was first announced in mid?July.

Liverpool roots, long arc

Echo & the Bunnymen formed in Liverpool in 1978. The original line?up brought together vocalist Ian McCulloch, guitarist Will Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson; by 1980 Pete de Freitas had joined on drums. The early studio run still defines how the band are heard: Crocodiles in 1980, Heaven Up Here in 1981, Porcupine in 1983 and Ocean Rain in 1984. Later landmarks on the official file include The Stars, The Oceans & the Moon in 2018 and the Evergreen 25 Year Anniversary Edition in 2022. Apples For Isaac is the first album of new material since Meteorites in 2014, and it sits on that continuum rather than as a nostalgia exercise: new songs, a current label partnership with BMG, and live dates that put McCulloch and the band back in rooms their audience already knows.

For listeners who have kept the records in rotation — from the early Island and Korova years through the later live and anniversary sets — the practical picture is simple: the album is a week away, McCulloch signs in Liverpool on the day it lands, Camp and Furnace follows on 20 September, Regent’s Park on 22 and 23 September, and Barrowland closes the year on 20 and 22 December. What remains unannounced is any fuller 2027 itinerary; for now the story is the record, the drummer who helped finish it, and the short string of UK rooms that will hear it first.