Johnny Foreigner have announced their new album, ‘Forwards!’, with the single ‘The New Navigation’ and details of a UK tour. Find all the details below.
The Birmingham indie band will release the record on September 4 via Alcopop! Records, following on from 2024’s ‘How To Be Hopeful’. Pre-order/pre-save here.
They have described the forthcoming project as a “small collection of songs” about their home city. It comprises 10 full-length tracks, “six actual songs”, each named from prominent bits of Birmingham media, and “four cursed field recordings”.
To preview ‘Forwards!’, the four-piece have shared the noisy, thrashing cut ‘The New Navigation’, which takes its name from an 18th-century folk song, Birmingham Lads (The New Navigation), about the city’s new waterways making Birmingham a desirable place to live.
“Our version is about the 1945 Distribution of Industry Act that deliberately choked Birmingham’s expansion, and the current ‘managed bankruptcy’ that’s cutting services, selling assets, and pushing folks out of the city,” explained frontman Alexei Berrow.
On the whole, ‘Forwards!’ will take the listener on a roughly chronological journey through key moments in Brummie history. These include the Lunar Society/Priestley Riots, post-war brutalist redevelopment, and “the current era of apathy, strikes, mystery fires, and grifters stoking dangerously misguided ‘patriotism'”.
The album came from the group’s view of Birmingham as both a microcosm of the wider country, and a testing ground for 200 years of unaccountable Westminster experimentation. Its title is lifted from the city’s oft-derided civic motto.
Brummie trio Luxury Nan Smell contribute backing vocals throughout the record as The City Elders, who interrupt, question or comment on the songs like a running director’s commentary.
Bryn Bowen, meanwhile, appears as The Lords Of Change – a recurring voice embodying the landlords, lawmakers and civic powerbrokers who shape the city from above.
“It’s a record of where we came from and why we are like this,” Johnny Foreigner said in a statement. “A record of how parliament and press stoked division and invoked ‘patriotism’ to burn the foreigners out of town. A record of how our nominally progressive Labour council was useless, controlled and corrupted, and bankrupted our city, and of how we were once quietly proud of our ingenuity, tolerance, and hope for the future… and now we are not.
“[…] As ever, this seems like both a dumb move in terms of Furthering Our Career/Increasing Our Demographic, and absolutely the right thing for Our Band Johnny Foreigner to do.”
They concluded: “And as ever, we are super proud of what we’ve made, but being from Birmingham, we pathologically cannot admit that out loud.”
Johnny Foreigner are taking ‘Forwards!’ on a UK headline tour this September. Buy tickets here, and see the full schedule below.
SEPTEMBER
03 – JT Soar, Nottingham
04 – The Social, London
06 – The Joiners, Southampton
07 – The Exchange, Bristol
08 – Dead Wax, Norwich
09 – Yellow Arch Studios, Sheffield
10 – Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
13 – YES, Manchester
17 – The Fighting Cocks, Kingston