The drummer on ten of the eleven songs did not live to hear the finished record. Clem Burke, a longtime friend of Ian McCulloch, died in April 2025 at the age of 70, while Echo & the Bunnymen were still completing Apples for Isaac. The band finished it without him.
Apples for Isaac is released on Friday 18 September through BMG. It is the band’s 13th studio album and their first since Meteorites in 2014, according to NME.
A Drummer Who Did Not See It Finished
Burke is best known for his work with Blondie, and he also played with the Ramones. On Apples for Isaac he is not a guest on one track. He is the drummer on almost all of it.
The band marked his contribution with a short statement when the album was announced in July. They described Burke as integral to the making of the album and said he died, heartbreakingly, during its completion, according to NME and Rock Cellar Magazine.
The Quietus, which heard the album before release, says his drumming drives the record. That is the practical fact behind the statement: the rhythm section of a band’s comeback album was recorded by a player who is no longer here to take it on the road.
McCulloch in the Producer’s Chair
There was no outside producer. McCulloch produced Apples for Isaac himself and handled the mix alongside Alan Moulder and Andrea Wright, according to The Line of Best Fit.
In a long interview with The Quietus, McCulloch described the album as a labour of love made over several years. The writer describes a record of short, catchy three-minute songs with a big reverb that McCulloch says is neither posh nor clean.
His writing method is unchanged by technology. McCulloch told The Quietus that songs come to him out of the blue while he sits on the sofa, that he keeps them in his head rather than recording voice memos, and that Lab Rats Ran was built on the C, F and G chords he has always loved. He also said he believes his voice is better now than it was on the band’s first four albums.
Will Sergeant Filed the Guitar Parts Away
McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant are the constants. Both have been in the band since it formed in Liverpool in 1978 and through its reformation in 1996, Rock Cellar notes.
The Quietus singles out Sergeant’s guitar work on Brussels Is Haunted, The Light That Surrounds You, Hijacked and Asimov. Sergeant told the site that the guitar runs were ideas he had been carrying around in his head and had put on file, an understated account of parts that the writer says underpin the lead single.
Hijacked is described as a rougher, swaggering track that recalls some of the spirit of Evergreen, the band’s 1990s comeback record. The Quietus describes the band’s sound as propulsive and guitar-driven, and on these songs the guitar is still doing the heavy lifting.
Brussels, Mortality and a Saxophone
The lead single, Brussels Is Haunted, is a love song to the Belgian capital, a city that took the band under its wing in 1980 and still turns out for them, according to The Quietus. That first trip is chronicled in Sergeant’s second book, Echoes. McCulloch said the song’s handclaps and closing sha-la-las were a deliberate nod to the pop records of his youth.
Mortality runs through the rest of the album. McCulloch told The Quietus that he nailed the subject on the ballad Unstoppable Force, which he called possibly the most concise and perfect song he has written. He also described the album as a conversation with a higher power about the state of the world.
Lab Rats Ran is the oddity. The Quietus describes it as an offbeat track with a saxophone part, possibly the first on any Bunnymen record, and McCulloch said its lyrics pay tribute to his heroes, from Pelé and Shakespeare to Elvis Presley.
The Painters and Records Behind the Lyrics
McCulloch’s reference points are older than the band. He told The Quietus that Echo & the Bunnymen are, in his mind, a 1970s band, and that 1972 remains a creative touchstone for him. The records that formed him are the ones he still recommends: David Bowie, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, whose wisdom he says everyone should listen to.
Visual art matters just as much. McCulloch called Hieronymus Bosch his favourite painter of all time, and Brussels Is Haunted includes a line asking what Bosch would make of it all. In the interview he described Bosch as a painter of the sins of human existence rather than someone setting out to make art, and The Quietus notes that Bosch resonates with McCulloch’s view of himself as a self-taught outsider.
The interviewer compared Lab Rats Ran to Reed’s Street Hassle, a comparison McCulloch welcomed. He argued that Reed and Cohen were far funnier than their reputations suggest, and he insisted that his own debt to Reed stops at influence rather than imitation.
He also drew a lesson from Bowie about how much to say regarding your own records. Bowie once said he wished he had made Station to Station dry, and McCulloch said that remark taught him not to spoil other people’s listening by dwelling on what he dislikes in his own work. It is part of why he is comfortable saying that his voice now sounds better than it did on the early albums.
The band’s European audience runs through the new record too. The Quietus recalls a 2018 show in Narva, Estonia, played in a crumbling 19th-century mill complex on the Russian border, and Brussels Is Haunted is a love song to a city that has supported them since their first visit in 1980.
Eleven Songs After Twelve Years Away
The tracklist runs: Take Me By the Hand, Can’t Be Sold, Brussels Is Haunted, I’ll Be Your Sunshine, Hijacked, The Honey, Unstoppable Force, The Light That Surrounds You, Lab Rats Ran, Asimov and We Prayed in the Dark.
Brussels Is Haunted arrived with the announcement in July. The Light That Surrounds You followed in August, and Take Me By the Hand, the opening track, is the latest single, according to the Pause and Play release listings, which also note that the CD comes with two postcard inserts.
The gap since the last album was not silent. The band released the compilation The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon in 2018 and spent years touring their classic material, The Line of Best Fit notes. Those classics set a high bar: The Cutter reached the UK Top 10 in 1983, and The Killing Moon did the same a year later before finding a younger audience through the film Donnie Darko in 2001, according to Rock Cellar. NME gave Meteorites three stars in 2014.
A Short Run of Shows Around the Release
The summer brought a scare. McCulloch’s vehicle was involved in a road traffic incident in June, forcing the band to postpone a show at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, NME reported. His injuries were described as not believed to be serious, and he recovered in time for a homecoming show at Anfield in Liverpool as special guests of My Chemical Romance at the end of June.
The release is followed by two nights at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London on 22 and 23 September, with two dates at the Barrowland in Glasgow on 20 and 22 December. McCulloch told The Quietus that the band are playing with passion and that everything is clicking on stage.
Bands of this vintage often trade on the old records. BestRock.News looked at another long-running group that still works the way it always did when The Jesus and Mary Chain explained how they still record. Apples for Isaac is a different kind of continuity: a new record, made by the two founders and a friend who is no longer here to play it live.
About The Author
