The Slow Readers Club

Manchester-based electro/indie quartet Slow Readers Club crafts guitar-driven pop songs laced with shadowy theatricality. Omerta, the group’s original incarnation, came together in 2003. Two years afterward the outfit inked a deal with Northern Ambition, only to vanish abruptly in 2007. Vocalist Aaron Starkie waited another four years before reviving the project and rechristening it Slow Readers Club. Amid repeated personnel shifts the band issued its self-titled debut album independently in 2011. By 2013 the lineup had stabilized around Aaron Starkie on vocals, Kurtis Starkie on guitar, Jim Ryan on bass, and David Whitworth on drums. That same year the quartet became the inaugural act invited to perform inside Manchester Central Library. Recognizing the venue’s perfectly fitting name, they captured the concert on film and tape, issuing the results as the live album Slow Readers Club: Live at the Library before year’s end. Their second long-player, Cavalcade, arrived in 2015; after hearing it, a member of Mancunian band James asked the group to open on the Girl at the End of the World tour. Over the ensuing three years Slow Readers Club concentrated on concerts and festival appearances, gradually expanding its audience across the rest of the U.K. In 2018 the band signed with Modern Sky—the first label since its reformation—to release the third studio album, Build a Tower. That set became their chart debut, reaching the U.K. Top 20 on the same day the concert document Live from Festival No. 6 also appeared. September brought the EP For All Here to Observe, which offered acoustic versions of signature tracks from their catalog.

Extensive touring throughout the U.K. and Europe followed in 2019, capped by the September release of the double album Live at O2 Apollo Manchester. Two shows at the Manchester Ritz the next month proved to be the band’s final large-scale hometown performances for more than three years. Live work was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, yet 2020 still yielded two studio albums from Slow Readers Club. Recorded at Parr St. in Liverpool, March’s The Joy of the Return achieved their highest chart placing to date at number ten in the U.K., although it marked their final release for Modern Sky. The concise, brooding 91 Days in Isolation surfaced independently that October and nonetheless reached the Top 40. Material from both albums finally received live outings on U.K. headline tours in 2021 and 2022, as well as during support dates with the Pixies.

Following a move to Manchester’s Velveteen Records, the subsequent singles “Knowledge Freedom Power” (November 2022) and “Modernise” (January 2023) signaled a sharper electronic direction. Both tracks featured on the band’s sixth album, which borrowed its title from the earlier single and surfaced in February.