Over the last few years we’ve all been forced to pause and reflect. With life returning – but not as we know it – we all experienced that sense of starting over and asking ourselves if things could ever be quite like they were before. Acclaimed London indie four-piece Gengahr have been through the wringer, too – taking stock and making peace with everything they have been through. Now they’re back, with a career-best fourth album and a new lease of life. Released on their own label with a new team behind them and a new lease of life, new album ‘Red Sun Titans’ is the sound of a band reborn – harnessing the energy and inspiration of their past but with a bold and fiercely independent vision for the future. It’s an album “caught in between two worlds,” as frontman Felix Bushe puts it – a colourful celebration where you’ve come from, and dreaming of where you could go from here.
Having formed Gengahr at school with his pals bassist Hugh Schulte, drummer Danny Ward, and guitarist John Victor, Bushe returned to the wide-eyed youthful wonderlust of when they met. Driven by a similar energy and sense of fun as their 2015 debut ‘A Dream Outside’ – “with no end goal and just four friends doing what they love,” as Bushe puts it – the horizon of their fourth album would be the fresh start Gengahr needed after some serious self-analysis. ‘Red Sun Titans’ would take the band right back to the drawing board. “It was a nice opportunity to revisit where the origins of our creativity came from,” remembers Bushe of the writing of ‘Red Sun Titans’. “A lot of the imagery and backdrop to the songs is set in these very primitive memories of watching cartoons as a child, of watching films by weird directors like Jodorowsky, listening to The Beatles in the car on the way to school and not really realising how surreal and otherworldly it was at the time, or dipping our toes in a slightly more psychedelic world. That’s what led me into deciding that music was what I wanted to do.