The Slow Readers Club’s show the way back to emotional balance after riding the storm of the loss a relationship finding its own conclusion, releasing Our Song Is Sung, the latest and final tease from their seventh album, Out Of A Dream – OUT FRI 14 MARCH 2025. By bringing the four complex and tender minutes of new music to a fanbase rapt by recent intense live performances and the band’s enduring, open-hearted lyrical depictions of universal truths, the needle is poised to drop on another classic ‘Readers’ album.
Having last month released the equally euphoric and heartbreaking Boy So Blue, which pushed the band out of any brooding-indie comfort zone to become an unleashed electro-pop machine, each single from Out Of A Dream has built a sense of a band seeking new adventures. Whilst 2024’s Technofear and the New Year release of Animals kept the Readers formula intact, the band had moved into new realms of drama, precision, abandon and joy.
Meticulously constructed in their home city of Manchester, alongside producer, Joe Cross (Courteeners, Hurts, Louis Tomlinson), the range of ideas associated with modern life, broken hearts and lifelong passions boiled up to become a complete album. Our Song Is Sung, where light touch balladry swells into a hail of caustic buzz-guitars, is an apt, final tease to represent their fluid creative process.
“Some bands write wedding songs, we write divorce songs” says singer and co-songwriter, Aaron Starkie. “’Our Song Is Sung’ is a song about navigating the dying stages of a relationship, confronting the painful reality of love fading into the distance, mourning what’s passed but looking toward a better future for the both of you. Musically it feels really warm and organic and builds in layers of intensity throughout the track.”
Fiercely independent, growing as a result of their own ingenuity through an occasionally welcoming, but frequently wearying music industry, Out Of A Dream is self-released on multiple formats including special edition vinyl, CD and innovative digital formats. Looking ahead to the release, the band offers a track-by-track guide to each of their previous singles and the remaining, six soon-to-be-heard songs on the expansive release:
1. Technofear (Aaron)
“’Technofear’ is a song about fighting to maintain a solid sense of reality in a world where most of our lives are lived online. Social media is a bewildering landscape where truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods mingle in a dizzying swirl of information. Hence: “A flicker of light conspires to deceive”. Algorithms, designed to maximise engagement, prioritise sensationalism over accuracy, making it difficult to distinguish between credible sources and false narratives and illusions.”
2. Animals (Aaron)
“I think Kurt (Starkie – guitars) kicked this one off, perhaps with a riff he’d already got down at home. It instantly felt very upbeat and positive to me, and maybe out of our comfort zone. But that’s turned out to be for the best. Lyrically, I really leaned into that element of ours, perhaps mainly my sense of being unsettled and made it a full-on love song that references big stadium ballads. The line: “Come join me dancing in the dark” is a nod to the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. I love all our parts on this one and think the drums and bass make it what it turned into.”
3. Little White Lies (David Whitworth – drums)
“This one has a really great flow. Musically, the groove just happened, pretty much instantly. We played the main hook on a loop and Aaron came up with loads of great melody ideas. We did that and then left it alone for about six months, really because we’d been too busy and had too many sons to work on. It was the right thing to do. Letting it rest means it has kept a really organic feel and feels unpredictable structurally.”
4. Dear Silence (David)
“The first recording we have of ‘Dear Silence’ it is Kurt and Aaron playing through the chorus melody. Jim (Ryan – bass) mentioned he’d watched a Fleetwood Mac documentary and Christine McVie said that, once she has a hook, she’d just write the rest of the song to serve that main hook. That’s probably the case with this tune.”
5. Know This I Am (Aaron)
“Kurt came up with the riff at home on an acoustic guitar, jammed it first with Jim and I, then David added drums to that early demo. The structure remained the same from that very first practise recording. It’s themed around the conflict between humanity and the rapidly advancing, dominant powers of the digital age. The opening lines, “Here come the robots, I am a caveman crawling,” suggest a feeling of being left behind or out of place in a world dominated by technological progress.”
6. Boy So Blue (Aaron)
“The electronic element of our sound evolves from song to song and album to album. As we’ve always been drawn to the sounds of early Depeche Mode, Erasure, New Order and LCD Soundsystem, we decided to put those influences front and centre. ‘Although it’s a big, joyous dance track, it’s about hiding deep emotional pain and trauma and how hedonistic coping mechanisms, like drugs, alcohol, and womanizing, are just temporary distractions.”
7. Pirouette (Aaron)
“Confusion, uncertainty and vulnerability are covered by ‘Pirouette’s lyrics, sharing some of the themes explored in ‘Technofear’. It’s about not being able to establish a sense of truth or control in an increasingly disorienting world. The spiralling chorus is a musical expression of that confusion, like I am trapped in an endless cycle.”
8. Puppets (Aaron)
“This one started life as a home demo of mine and I really liked the hypnotic feel of the riff. It developed from a studio perspective, rather than a live one. Joe, our producer, added the mad rhythmic arpeggiated synth and helped us create the latter half of the tune, as we only had a verse and chorus going in to work on it. It became a song about the shadowy influence of billionaires and corporations on our political leaders and the constant pursuit of wealth.”
9. Loved You Then (Aaron)
“Completely unlike ‘Puppets’ this one was born in the practice room. It’s closest to what people might say is our core sound and would have been at home on previous records. The words didn’t come easy and I had to go over it multiple times. I love the chorus, even if the lines are a bit challenging to sing. Looking back on your childhood and blaming your parents for what’s become of your life is something I’ve heard a lot from people over the years.”