With full-length album Fort Sensible coming early in 2025 via Coolin’ By Sound, Tape/Off have returned with a brand new track ‘Flat Earthers’. It’s a song which uses its titular demographic to explore simplistic attitudes more generally, decrying the contemporary trend to favour superficial thoughts over ambiguity and nuance. “It’s probably one of the very few songs in my life where I’ve written the words before the music, because it was something that I obviously wanted to get off my chest that way,” explains songwriter and guitarist Ben Green. “What initially fired me up was stuff you hear all the time, but I managed to have a couple of conversations in a row which pissed me off, and it was probably people talking about individuals and saying, ‘Oh, that person’s done really well, aren’t they great’ or ‘That person’s really stuffed up, aren’t they an idiot’:

To me it exemplified this ignorance that’s really pervasive these days. We’re so often conditioned to see everything as ‘individuals making choices’ and you don’t look any deeper than that – they make ‘good choices’ or ‘bad choices’ – but you don’t look behind it all and consider, ‘What’s their situation? What are they coming out of? What forces are pressing on them?’ It occurred to me that these people are like flat earthers – they think that everything’s flat, when everything is definitely not flat. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

The message is delivered with a combination of defiant punk and rousing 90s alt rock, complete with a singalong chorus that somehow combines simmering frustration and carefree joy. It’s a whole lot of fun and whets appetites for the record very nicely.

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With the album on the horizon, latest single ‘Instant Coffee’ provides another glimpse inside, offering a slightly different dimension to the Dumb Things sound. With Keinonen taking lead vocal duties, the track possesses a slightly darker tone, tapping into the small melancholy of mundane details as performed in solitude. “I fill the kettle with water to dilute the time / Weather system forming in the kitchen,” as the song opens. “If I was a smoking man I’d spend all the dry season / Blowing storm clouds at the ceiling.” But as the track develops, the picture is revealed to be a little more nuanced. A certain conviction reached by the crescendo that might not be happiness or even acceptance, but it is something all the same.

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The track was the first from second album, We Are Still Wild Horses, coming via PRAH Recordings next February. A record which sees MF Tomlinson retreat from the chaotic world captured on the last record in search of a more personal truth. An introspective journey as striking and lonely as any quest could be. If ‘A Cloud’ found him caught within a dream, latest single ‘Winter Time Blues’ represents a snapping to attention. The steps along a path leading deep within himself, the titular blues descending as the light slowly fades.

I’ve got the blues again
Doing my fucking head in
After all, for chrissakes I’m an Australian

The album is supported by a comprehensive array of theatre, dance and film work led by director and choreographer Daisy JT Smith. A supplementary strand of the project which aims “to create a living breathing embodiment of the album,” as Smith puts it. “Taking sounds and themes of the album as its inspiration using the language of dance and theatre.” You can watch part two of the film below:

We Are Still Wild Horses will be released on the 17th February, 2023 via PRAH Recordings and you can pre-order it now from the MF Tomlinson Bandcamp page.

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