Recorded and mixed at Sam & Rachel Studios, London.
Mastered by Mikey Young.

Sour Grapes is The Light Sleepers first album in over fifteen years, following their debut We Are Gathering Dust, a title that would become an unintentionally self-fulfilling prophecy for a band who would spend more time than not in an accidental musical stasis over the next decade-and-a-half. In some senses, their first musical entrée stymied them—its naive purity unmatchable, its adolescent pretensions admired. It became that seminal, poignant summer of our youth in sonic form, written in the dank depths of frustrated suburbia with a plethora of Pavement and Yo La Tengo sounding out from the Goodmans CD player.

Formed in Exeter when the band’s only constants—brothers Patrick and Oliver Fisher, also of Cold Pumas and Marcel Wave—were in their late teens / early twenties, various relocations and ill-advised reinventions followed, until at some point they actually began to write (instead of talking about writing) what would become their sophomore effort. Sour Grapes was recorded as a quintet with Maike Hale-Jones on bass, Frances Perkins on organ and Jack Gillis on drums, and feels in some ways a perfectly refracted sequel to We Are Gathering Dust, a letter from an older self beyond the veil, where the college radio hits feel closer to home, the instrumentation lusher and more orchestral.

Following suit lyrically, Sour Grapes examines its own nostalgia and domestic memory on ‘Mock-Tudor’, the album closer ‘Silver Linings Fog Your Mind’ and ‘Melamine’ where Fisher P. sings ‘supermarché odours beach me, asphalt hollows burn beneath me’. Elsewhere, ‘Peel Back the Curtain’, ‘Strictly Business’ and ‘The Curate’s Egg’ are bitter peer reviews: ‘criss-cross the concrete floor, and with a peppery smile, we sort the wheat from the chaff’, whilst ‘Splendour in the Grass’ and ‘Primrose Path’ ruminate on the pros-and-cons of the stepping stones of ‘adult life’: ‘The cottage surveyed, the village dismayed, the gastropub paid, the adult pomade, the steak is sautéed, the napkin is frayed, and they’ve been drinking’

Like its predecessor, Sour Grapes still shimmers and yearns, and yet it does so In Memoriam to youth and possibility, instead of holding that very same thing so fervently to its chest. It is a soundtrack to a drunken walk home from a strange reunion, a fleeting pang of nostalgia in a crowded room, an enduring ghost inside ourselves we have come to accept.