Gangway are back, back, back! The Danish pop group, who split up in 1998, release a fantastic new album, Whatever It Is, on 5 April. Fêted with multiple awards in their home country, their biggest moment in the UK probably came with dissolute single My Girl and Me (1986).
Gangway's first album The Twist, with its echoes of The Smiths, came out back in 1984; Whatever It Is feels appropriately like the follow-up to the band's final, seventh, That's Life (1996). In the spirit of experimentation on that album, Whatever It Is is completely contemporary - as if That's Life had been moved forward in time.
The songwriting is as lovely as ever, as evidenced on first single Colourful Combinations, augmented by some fascinating sounds: there's a great mix from track Whatever… to the penultimate Exit, with its sample reference to where they left off 23 years ago - a hiatus worthy of filmmakers Whit Stillman, Terrence Malick or Roy Andersson. Second single Don't Want to Go Home, reworked from songwriter Henrik Balling's The Quiet Boy side project, sits particularly well here (I love, again, the odd noise at the end).
The band intend to back up this tremendous achievement with a series of live dates throughout the year. You can find links to the album and more on the band's Facebook page.
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