When Matt Johnson released his sixth album as The The in 2000, there was no hint it might be 25 years before the next record from the London outfit in which he is the only constant member.
Sure, he was a little bit burnt out, he acknowledges on a call from Seattle where The The had a show on the tour that plays the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 8.
“I probably started my career earlier than a lot of my contemporaries in that I was in bands from the age of 11, singing, doing little gigs, and then I was working in a record studio at the age of 15,” Johnson says “I formed The The at 17.
“So I was almost sort of 10 years possibly ahead of many people similar age to me,” he says. “”I probably needed the time off, really, to do different things.”
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But there’s time off and then there’s disappearing. After releasing “NakedSelf” in 2000, that was it. Or it was until September when Johnson returned with 12 new songs and the seventh The The album “Ensoulment.”
“I’d been doing soundtracks and such, but that’s more solitary,” Johnson says of his return to the studio. “I play all the instruments myself on the soundtracks, and it’s more just in my studio with my engineer.”
The 2016 death of his artist brother, Andrew “Andy Dog” Johnson, who’d illustrated many of The The’s record sleeves for albums and singles, shook Johnson deeply.
“That was a hammer blow for me when that happened,” he says. “I went through quite a few bereavements over the years, and that particular one, it caused me to step back and take stock. Weigh up in life what was important to me apart from, obviously, friends and my family, my children.
“Also it made me realize I wanted to get back to doing what I used to love doing, which was songwriting and recording albums,” Johnson says.
Andy Dog’s death inspired the 2017 Record Store Day single, “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” which featured Johnny Marr, a former member of The The, on guitar along with Johnson.
A year later in 2018, “The Inertia Variations,” a documentary on Johnson and The The, prompted The The’s comeback tour, which brought the band to the Los Angeles for its first U.S. shows since 2000.
Then, thrilled with how good his live band sounded, Johnson decided to make a new record with them, only for the pandemic to backburner those plans until now.
“It was wonderful, actually,” Johnson says of getting back to work at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World studio with the band at the end of 2023. “It made me realize how much I’d missed it – the camaraderie and playing. There’s that magic that happens when you have a number of musicians working together.
“So if felt very much like, I suppose, if you can imagine on a very cold day you could slip into a nice, warm bubble bath,” he says. “Or on a very hot day, diving into a nice, cool swimming pool.
“It was a very comfortable, exhilarating experience for me. It was very enjoyable.”
A warm, hopeful album
“Ensoulment” seems at once both like classic The The, a post-punk sound infused with soul and blues, and something fresh and modern. Johnson reunited with producer Warren Livesey, who’d worked on earlier albums such as “Infected” and “Mind Bomb,” and most of the musicians who play on it knew the The The vibe from several years of live shows with him.
“This was an easier album to make,” Johnson says. “There’s a spontaneity. ‘NakedSelf’ took quite a number of years, and they’ve all been quite time-consuming. But for this one, I purposely set quite strict parameters.
“I wanted the songs to be not much more over three minutes,” he says. “Quite short and concise, so that from the writing point of view, I didn’t want there to be any part of the song that seemed to drag.
“The sound, I wanted a warm sound,” Johnson continues. “I wanted to use a certain amount of acoustic instruments. We use fiddles, we use saxophones and trumpets. Glockenspiels, acoustic drums.”
Rich melodies and organic sounds were key, he says, particularly in this era of digital sampling and autotune.
“And despite the subject matter maybe being quite dark or serious, there was always a hopeful message,” Johnson says. “To feel like a hopeful album, that was very important to me.”
He succeeded in that quest despite songs that as he noted sometimes touched on difficult subjects. His father died in 2018, two days before The The played Royal Albert Hall. The new song “Where Do We Go When We Die?” was written for him.
“It’s a form of therapy for me to do that,” Johnson says. “And I wanted to write a song that was very personal but also universal.
“I also wanted it to be a hopeful song,” he says. “I’m not a religious person, but I will consider myself, I suppose, a person with quite strong spiritual beliefs. I’m not an atheist. I’m more agnostic.
“I do believe there’s a cycle of life and that part of us, the human soul, the human spirit, lives on and maybe, maybe comes back, maybe moves somewhere else.”
Coffee with William Blake
Other tracks on the album touch on topics including politics, war, love and sex and death.
“Some Days I Sit by the Grave of William Blake” is based on Johnson’s own practice. In his 20s, an ex-girlfriend lived near Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds, where the poet Blake was laid to rest nearly 200 years ago. More recently, Johnson moved back to the neighborhood, and would walk past the cemetery, pausing for a coffee with Blake.
“It’s a dissenters’ cemetery, actually,” Johnson says. “In his day, William Blake was very anti-establishment. He was quite outspoken against the establishment of the day, the monarchy of the day, and so he was buried in a sort of pauper’s grave.
“This was a song title that just popped into my head one day while I was having my coffee there,” he says. “I had the title, the first verse and the chorus quite a few years ago but could never finish it until now.”
The song fits neatly alongside other The The songs about London, such as “Heartland,” “Pillar Box Red,” and “Beaten Generation,” Johnson says.
“It’s a comment not only on my personal relationship with London,” he says. “Like many of us, the cities that we have a relationship with, it changes over time.
“The cities that we know maybe when we are in our late teens and 20s, and going through all these formative experiences and having this exciting life, are very dynamic, evolving places,” Johnson says. “So we no longer possibly feel part of it, and buildings and shops or restaurants or bars that we associated with that city change.
“There’s also a commentary on where we are politically, with the increasing censorship, and the tyrannical laws, the forever wars,” he says. “Here’s also this mass privatization, this transfer of wealth from the natural resources and what was in public ownership to these tiny minorities.
“So it was a political commentary as well as a sort of personal commentary on changing London.”
Soul and Nina Simone
“Ensoulment,” the title of the new record, arose from Johnson’s interest in artificial intelligence and what it may mean for humanity.
“It’s the moment the soul enters the body,” he says of the meaning of ensoulment. “I like the word because it’s somehow tied in with two of my earlier albums, “Burning Blue Soul” and “Soul Mining.” It’s nice to have ‘soul’ in the title again after 25 years.
“But the other reason I liked it is because with the rise of AI we’ve started to question what it is to be human,” Johnson says. “There was an interesting report I read recently, I think it was in Australia. Something like 70 percent of people online now cannot tell the difference between if they’re communicating with an AI or a human.
“This poses an interesting philosophical question for me, the definition of humanity,” he says. “I’m rambling a bit here, but I wanted to bring that element into this album, because there’s this great quote from Nina Simone that I often refer to.
“She said that every artist has a duty to reflect the times in which they live. So for me, I’ve always tried to do that with the earlier albums and into the lyrical content, as well as some background noise within the lyrics.
“You’ve got the lyrics,” Johnson says. “They’re personal. Some of them are political. They’re set in this time, obviously now. But there’s echoes, if I can use this, echoes of the future as well as the past.”
The The’s Ensouled World Tour
When: 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 8. Show at 8:30 p.m.
Where: Shrine Auditorium, 665 W. Jefferson, Los Angeles
How much: $34 to $168
For more: Shrineauditorium.com or Thethe.com