The Soft Boys will release Nextdoorland, the twenty-two years in the making follow-up to Underwater Moonlight (the band's influential second LP), on September 24th. "It's a rock-guitar-bass-drum-harmony record -- another variant on the Beatles, really," singer, Robyn Hitchcock told Rolling Stone. "Whenever I make records with a band it's always some kind of Beatles record."

The Soft Boys have worked on the record on and off over the last several months, a process Hitchcock finds more rewarding than working straight through. "Whenever I've worked on an album like that I've regretted it," he said. "This has been done with gaps and working in bursts of two or three days, so real life has flowed through this record like nothing else, really."

With more than two decades between Underwater Moonlight -- an album both the Replacements and R.E.M. cited as a major influence -- and Nextdoorland, Hitchcock admits to feeling some pressure over the new album's reception. "There's bound to be a certain amount of nervousness," he said. "[The fans] will be initially pleased to hear it, and then they'll say it's not as good as Underwater Moonlight and then about five years down the line they'll probably get to like it on it's own merit."

But Nextdoorland is not an attempt to rehash the band's past work. "It's not like Underwater Moonlight," Hitchcock said. "The atmosphere is very different, because we're not receiving the same emotional nutrients. As a songwriter, I'm not feeling anything like I was when I wrote those songs, and as a group we're all twenty years older, but I think it works nonetheless. Every so often I hear bits of it and I think, 'God, that sounds like the Soft Boys.'"

CHRISTINA SARACENO
(July 10, 2002)