New Release – Twenty-Five Years (album) by Storm of Crows

Storm of Crows are a three-piece rock band based in Sheffield and Stockport (UK). The three members, Jimmy, Matt, and Paul, were all originally in a band together in 1997, but reformed only recently, in 2020, to start making music again.

‘Twenty-Five Years’ is their first album in, well, twenty-five years. The album will be released 2nd December.

Did you have to overcome any difficulties with the writing or recording of this release?

“I wouldn’t say we overcame any particular difficulties with the album, but it was one long, steep learning curve. I think we’ve all had to tackle learning new things in order to record this album in our homes. We also had no idea it would take this long to begin with. It was just over two years ago when we decided to make the album and we foolishly thought we’d have it out by February 2021. Even in the January with two songs under our belts we’re still thinking “Come on, we REALLY don’t have a lot of time left for these last ten!” It taking as long as it did and us getting better and more confident as we went along meant that by the time we were nearly finished, the first songs didn’t sound as good as we originally thought, so Matt has been going back again and again and saying “Have a listen to this guys. I’ve just tweaked ‘Drifting Away’ again…” In fact, even though that was the first song we did finish for the album, it was the last one Matt finished tinkering with before it was sent out for CD pressing and digital distribution.

Is this release different from your previous releases?

“Yes, it’s an album! Seriously though, we feel as if we’ve barely done a thing in the last couple of years. ‘You Decide’ came out in March 2021 and that was the last “proper” Storm of Crows song we released. After that we had a cover of ‘Gambler’s Last Day’ in August 2021, a collab with The Godzilla Attacks Tokyo Kamikaze Blues Band in February this year, and ‘Her Crime’ with a guest vocalist and in a very different style to our usual sound in July. The whole time though, behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard on the album, which got increasingly difficult as the world woke up and went back to normal following Covid. We’ve been desperate to finish it and get it out, but we’ve also been desperate to not cut corners, or rush anything. We said right from the start we wanted it to have twelve tracks, with each of us writing four of them, and we’ve stuck to that. We kind of had to really, as the last three were all Paul’s!”

What are your favourite memories of writing or recording the album?

“Writing the songs for this album has actually been very unusual. All of our singles to date were old songs written twenty years ago or longer (with the exception of our Christmas song) and they were all written by two or more of us. Writing new stuff for the album was very different because it’s the first time we’ve had to write songs by ourselves. Not to say we’ve never done that before, we all have, but without Covid we’d have been meeting up regularly and writing collaboratively. At least of a few tracks. For this album we’ve basically taken the approach that whoever writes the song gets to have the final word. The others can make suggestions but the writer has the power of veto – which was used more than a couple of times! It has been great sending our songs out to the other two guys to then hear their suggestions come back and building the tracks from there, but I think we’re all looking forward to being able to work more closely together on whatever it is we do next.”