Glasvegas

To be Airy Fairy, in the English vernacular, is to be impractical, idealistic, to live with your head in the clouds when the real world demands your feet on the ground. It’s a label that’s followed James Allan around for as long as he can remember – at school, on the football pitch and, since 2004, as the lead singer and songwriter at the heart of Glasvegas. “So many different people throughout my life have described me that way, and I always hated it,” says James. “When you’re younger, you fixate on the things you’re not good at, and I always wanted to be consistent.

“When I was a footballer, the coaches never quite knew what they were going to get, so they felt they couldn’t trust me. But then with music, there’s always been this other part of it where I’m able to not question the logic of what I’m doing and just let my whole personality form the thing. So I hated it when people called me airy fairy, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve recognised it in myself. I’ve learned to accept it.”

So much so, in fact, that he’s now named an album after it. Released on Fri 2nd April 2027 through Modern Sky, Airy Fairy, Glasvegas’ fifth full-length LP, is a document of where the band are almost two decades on from their debut, but also of who James Allan has become: the parts of himself he’s shed, and the others he’s finally stopped trying to outrun.

Glasvegas are survivors. From their humble beginnings in Glasgow’s east end, through the zero-to-warp-speed ascent of their eponymous 2008 debut and the major-label misadventures of its 2011 follow-up, Euphoric Heartbreak, they’ve lived through feast and famine alike: the early years when “nobody gave a shit”, and those spent under the microscope, where Allan’s foibles and excesses came under very public scrutiny. Yet the thing that’s sustained them through it all is the same supposed flaw that their frontman once bristled against: a refusal to compromise on their instincts, and a foolhardy belief that, however circuitous the route, they’ll eventually get where they’re going.

In 2023, however, Allan made a series of decidedly un-airy-fairy decisions. He got married, had a child and moved his family into a new house – all in short order. With so much going on, a new Glasvegas album wasn’t exactly the furthest thing from his mind, but after the “brutal” seven-year slog that was the making of 2021’s Godspeed, he was apprehensive about jumping straight back in. Those around him, however, were understandably anxious to know when the next record might actually materialise. “My sister Denise [Glasvegas’ longtime manager] got into the habit of calling me every week to see how the writing was going,” he explains, “and every week I’d have nothing new to tell her. It went on and on like that until finally one day she snapped, and was like, ‘James, do not have me phoning you again next week to hear the same fucking thing!’”

The song that finally unlocked things was Even Your Darkness Has a Light of Its Own, a moody, propulsive track that gallops towards a chorus of cathartic release. It was, he says, the moment a new Glasvegas album became possible. “Until you’ve got that first song, it’s like you’ve never written one before. You’re thinking, ‘Can I write a song? Will I be able to?’ You look over in the corner of the room, the guitar’s got teeth and you’re afraid to even pick it up. But that was the first time where I was like, ‘Alright, maybe this could be something cool…’ and then other songs, like ‘Degüello’ and ‘My Hate Part’, kind of flowed from there.”

Degüello, the opening track and lead single, is the album in microcosm: a song of small-hours self-examination projected onto Glasvegas’ IMAX-sized wall of sound. Its title (Spanish for ‘cutthroat’) may conjure the cinematic grandeur of a spaghetti western showdown, but its subject is more intimate: “Did I love too much or too little? Did I crush your wings trying to hold you too close?” he wonders, as he sifts through the debris of a life lived at full volume, in search of connection.

“The image I have in my head of that song is a guy on a horse with balloon animals tied to the back of it, setting off on a quest,” he explains. “But really, it’s just me. I got the phrase Degüello from an old film on TV, and I didn’t immediately connect it to myself, but songwriting can be like that – you start off clueless and you find your way to something. There might have been times when I was feeling depressed, but I wouldn’t have known it at the time. Only when I’ve looked back at a song ten years later and recognised it. It’s almost like leaving a fingerprint.”