The Durutti Column have announced Renascent, the project’s first album of original material in 16 years. The new record is due July 31 via London Records, and the first preview is “Liars,” a piece that does what Vini Reilly’s music has always done best: it makes delicacy feel stubborn.
Pitchfork reports that Reilly is joined on the record by longtime percussionist Bruce Mitchell and player-producer Keir Stewart, with Caoilfhionn Rose among the guests. The album arrives after January’s expanded reissue of The Return of the Durutti Column put the Factory Records-era debut back in circulation, and after a wave of renewed attention that has pulled Reilly’s guitar language into conversations far outside post-punk archaeology.
That renewed attention matters because The Durutti Column were always slightly misfiled by history. They came out of Manchester’s post-punk ecosystem, but Reilly’s playing rarely behaved like scene furniture. The signature sound was glassy, fluid, and private, closer to a thought arriving mid-sentence than a riff announcing itself at the door. “Liars” keeps that quality intact. It does not try to cosplay 1980. It lets the guitar drift and blur while the rhythm gives the whole thing just enough spine.
Renascent is listed as an 11-track release. The standard sequence includes “Echoes in the Memory,” “Your Shadow at Morning,” “Time Present and Time Past,” “Agonistes,” “Liars,” “Vapour in a Matchbox,” “Your Shadow at Evening,” “Sargasso Sea,” “Scammer,” and “For Friends Everywhere,” with “All They See Is Fire” included as a CD and digital bonus track.
The artwork also folds the band’s history back into the present without turning the announcement into a museum piece. Pitchfork notes that the album art was designed by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir of 8vo, two original illustrators for Factory. That is exactly the kind of detail that could become empty nostalgia in the wrong hands, but The Durutti Column’s music has never needed a hard sell. Its influence is quieter than mythology, and usually more durable.
The project’s previous album of original material was 2010’s A Paean to Wilson. A 16-year gap can make any return feel ceremonial, but “Liars” is more useful than that. It sounds like an artist returning to a room he never fully left, picking up the same emotional vocabulary and finding that it still knows how to glow.