Tindersticks

Tindersticks emerged during the 1990s as one of the United Kingdom’s most singular and unmistakable bands, diverging sharply from both the prevailing indie landscape and the Brit-pop guitar groups that ruled the charts. Over the ensuing decades the collective has persisted in shaping intricate, unhurried compositions built from dense arrangements, narrative-driven lyrics, understated vocals, and subdued yet sorrowful orchestral passages. At root the ensemble channeled the brooding romanticism associated with singers such as Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker through the idiosyncratic songwriting sensibility of Lee Hazlewood and the broader ethos of indie rock. A devoted following crystallized in the middle of the decade, sparked by the self-titled 1993 debut that Melody Maker crowned Album of the Year. At their strongest—on the two early untitled records, 2001’s Can Our Love…, and 2012’s The Something Rain—the group produced somberly luminous pieces that suggested imaginary film scores. This affinity for cinematic atmosphere naturally led to actual scoring work, most notably repeated collaborations with director Claire Denis. Entering their fourth decade, the musicians continue to generate fresh material, turning toward electronics and ambient soundscapes on 2021’s Distractions before embracing the immediacy of collective performance on 2024’s Soft Tissue.

The band’s roots trace to Asphalt Ribbons, a Nottingham indie-rock outfit whose lineup included vocalist Stuart Staples, keyboardist David Boulter, and violinist Dickon Hinchliffe. Those three musicians established Tindersticks in 1992; guitarist Neil Fraser, bassist Mark Colwill, and drummer Al Macaulay completed the initial roster. Their first release, the single “Patchwork,” appeared on their own Tippy Toe imprint in November 1992. Early the following year “Marbles” surfaced, succeeded by “A Marriage Made in Heaven,” a Rough Trade Singles Club collaboration with Huggy Bear’s Niki Sin. After issuing the Unwired EP on Tippy Toe, the fledgling This Way Up label signed the group.

The self-titled debut arrived midway through 1993 and drew widespread acclaim across the British press. By year’s end both the band and the album had secured near-universal critical approval, culminating in Melody Maker’s Album of the Year designation. Tindersticks maintained a relatively low profile throughout 1994, issuing a cover of John Barry’s James Bond theme “We Have All the Time in the World” from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the live set Amsterdam, and a version of Pavement’s “Here.” That same year Bar/None introduced the debut to American audiences. In spring 1995 the second untitled album appeared, featuring guest contributions from Gallon Drunk’s Terry Edwards and the Walkabouts’ Carla Torgerson; like its predecessor it earned enthusiastic notices and featured on numerous British year-end lists. November 1995 brought another live document, Bloomsbury Theatre.

Activity slowed during 1996, though the soundtrack to Claire Denis’s Nénette et Boni arrived that autumn, mixing previously released material, new pieces, and reinterpretations of older songs. A fresh recording of “A Marriage Made in Heaven” featuring Isabella Rossellini followed several months later and was subsequently added to the U.S. edition of 1997’s Curtains. Simple Pleasure, released in 1999, represented the group’s most emotionally direct statement to that point. A new association with Beggars Banquet began at the turn of the millennium, coinciding with renewed cohesion that shaped 2001’s Can Our Love…. Later the same year the band supplied the score for another Claire Denis film, Trouble Every Day. The proper successor, Waiting for the Moon, appeared in mid-2003.

Staples launched a solo career in 2005, prompting speculation about the band’s future, and eventually completed two albums under his own name. The speculation proved partly accurate when Hinchliffe, Colwill, and Macaulay departed in 2006. Staples, Fraser, and Boulter recruited longtime associate Terry Edwards plus additional musicians for sessions that produced 2008’s The Hungry Saw. Two years later Falling Down a Mountain introduced a further reconfiguration that included drummer Earl Harvin and guitarist David Kitt. Constellation gathered the long-running Denis partnership into the limited-edition box set The Claire Denis Film Scores 1996–2009, issued in April 2011; a U.K. tour of the material was planned for that autumn.

Recorded between May 2010 and August 2011, the ninth studio album contained nine new compositions, among them the hypnotic single “Medicine.” The Something Rain reached stores on 21 February 2012. The next Denis collaboration, the soundtrack to Les Salauds (The Bastards), appeared in autumn 2013 following the film’s premiere. October of that year also saw Across Six Leap Years, a 21st-anniversary collection of newly recorded catalog selections. In 2011 the In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium, commissioned a continuous soundscape for its permanent World War One centenary exhibition; the resulting album Ypres was released in October 2014.

The Waiting Room, issued 22 January 2016, expanded the group’s visual scope by pairing each new song with a distinct short film directed by Claire Denis, Rose Pedlow, Joe King, Christoph Girardet, and Gabriel Sanna among others. Its lead single, “Hey Lucinda,” featured a duet with the late Lhasa de Sela, who had died in 2010. Another film-centered project, Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith, arrived in 2017; Staples composed music for an edit of the pioneering naturalist’s footage, supported by percussionist Thomas Belhom, pianist Christine Ott, saxophonist Julian Siegel, and multi-instrumentalist David Coulter. For 2019’s No Treasure But Hope the musicians pursued a more organic approach, completing the tracks in only five days. An extensive international tour followed, encompassing the first North American dates in a decade. Distractions, released in 2021, marked a pronounced stylistic shift toward sparse, loop-based arrangements built around electronic percussion; the album achieved the band’s strongest chart results to date in Portugal and Switzerland while also performing well in Belgium and Austria. To mark their 30th anniversary the chronologically ordered retrospective Past Imperfect: The Best of Tindersticks ’92–’21 appeared, balancing material from the original and post-2010 lineups. After scoring Claire Denis’s 2022 film The Stars at Noon, the group completed its fourteenth studio album, Soft Tissue, favoring a song-oriented method centered on the sound of the band performing together.