Pixies

They’re out at the old church, the locals said, hiding in the shadow of the one-armed cross. Holed up in cabins crawling with critters, firing up the organ every morning, wailing songs of curses, death, witchcraft and unsatisfied spirits late into the night, on guitars embedded with their own dead teeth.Pixies, they call ‘em, out there in the wilds of Woodstock, beneath the eyrie.“It felt a bit haunted,” says bass Pixie Paz Lenchantin of Pixies’ four weeks at Dreamland Recording Studio, in the frost-bitten run-up to Christmas 2018. “We could’ve been filming aBlair Witchat the same time. The aura was thick. There was definitely a fifth member inside the church.”The making of the third new album since Pixies reformed in 2004 was cold on the bones, but warm on the marrow. After three decades beset with upheavals, splits, trials,and tribulations, Pixies was finally a band at ease with itself.Their first era -when Charles Thompson IV returned from a student exchange trip to Puerto Rico, dropped out of college, renamed himself Black Francis and, in January 1986, convinced his ex-UniversityofMassachusetts Amherst roommate Joey Santiago to start a band with him -redefined alternative rock and set the dynamic blueprint not just for grunge but underground guitar music for decades to come, but it was as fiery and turbulent off-record as on.Even as Francis turned his Pentecostal upbringing, flair for all things Spanish and interest in the seedier, more violent Biblical tales and mythologies into gruesome yet melodic punk noirs on seminal early albums Surfer Rosa(1988) and Doolittle(1989), and indulged his sci-fi obsessions on the silvered savagery of Bossanova(1990) and Trompe Le Monde(1991), the band fought and fractured. By1993,the combination of Francis’s rabid roars and saccharine pop babbles, Santiago’s rattlesnake guitar squirms, Dave Lovering’s brutalist drumming,and Kim Deal’s cat-purr basslines had made them influential, era-defining indie rock giants. But they were Pixies no more.Re-emerging in 2004, Pixies rode back into a town they’d designed on a wave of dark jubilation, headlining festivals such as Reading & Leeds and gathering plaudits like shrunken heads in a bag. Their first new song in thirteen years, “Bam Thwok,”topped download charts in 2004, but there were still rocks in the road ahead. Reluctant to make a new album, Deal left the band in 2013, so Pixies’ sensational sonic sprawl of a comeback album,IndieCindy(released as three EPs in 2013-14, then compiled into an album) was recorded with Jeremy Dubs of Bunnies on bass, and toured with Muffs singer Kim Shattuck stage left. Lenchantin, boasting A Perfect Circle, Queens of The Stone Age and Zwan on her immaculate indie rock CV, replaced Shattuck for the 2014 tour, becoming a fully paid-up Pixie in 2016, in time to record the abrasive sixth album Head Carrier(2016). That album saw long-term producer Gil Norton replaced by Tom Dalgety (Royal Blood). “That was quite invigorating, trying something new,” says Dave, and its tour saw one last rattle off-road.

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