Elbow Share New Foreboding New Song “Dexter & Sinister”
Image courtesy of the artist Music News Elbow
British rockers Elbow shared “Dexter & Sinister,” their first new song since 2017’s Little Fictions, on Thursday morning.
The seven-minute cut is swirling and foreboding, layering strutting guitars with bursts of orchestral noise in the first half of the song that leads into a wailing and more immediately groovy conclusion. The track has a loose, improvisational quality that keyboardist Craig Potter says comes from the band “playing live in the room and, on the second part, we decided not to play to a click to really allow the tune to breathe.”
Lyrically, “Dexter & Sinister” finds frontman Guy Garvey coming to terms with the U.K.’s political status and contextualizing its current place in the history of British heraldry; the title refers to the two sides of a shield bearing a coat of arms. Garvey explains that the song is “a great, big, bewildered question dealing with my feelings on Brexit, the loss of family and friends and the general sense of disaffection you see all around at the moment.”
“Dexter & Sinister” is being released as a one-sided 10” record with a lyric etching on the b-side. You can pick one of those up here. Listen to “Dexter & Sinister” and see its single art below, then revisit our 2014 interview with Garvey here.
”Dexter & Sinister” Single Art:
