Turning Heads speaks to Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat from Scottish indie rock band Arab Strap. Arab Strap’s new album, As Days Get Dark, is their first in 16 years. Get in touch: [email protected] Arab Strap formed in 1995. Their debut album, The Week Never Starts Around Here, arrived the following year. It was led by the single ‘The First Big Weekend’, which has become the group’s signature song. It combines spoken word vocals, drum machines, plucked guitars and themes of unglamorous late-night hedonism.They’d go on to release a total of six studio albums, including 2003’s Monday at the Hug & Pint and 2005’s The Last Romance, before calling it quits in 2006. Aidan and Malcolm both embarked on solo careers and engaged in various other collaborative projects over the next decade before reforming Arab Strap in 2016.They’ve toured intermittently since then and in September 2020 released their first new single in 15 years. That song, ‘The Turning Of Our Bones’, appears as the first track on As Days Get Dark, which is out now via Rock Action/Best & Fairest.The band’s various sonic and thematic signatures – drum machines, arpeggiated guitars, strings, spoken word vocals and themes of sex and death – remain intact, but As Days Get Dark is a musclier and more melodically persuasive record than any of the band’s earlier work.We spoke about the benefits of breaking up, the themes behind many of the songs and the experience of working together again after so many years apart.

Turning heads is recorded on the stolen land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation; the traditional custodians of the land. I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.