When Boston Manor set out on a two-album journey chronicling the post-pandemic crawl from darkness into light as it unfolded, it was an audacious gamble on their ability to get back on track. Finally crossing the line with sublime second part Sundiver, frontman Henry Cox reflects on the non-linear nature of healing, and how, truly, there is no fate but what we make…
The Dreamkeeper stands over 30 feet tall in a field five miles east of Blackpool. A bristling glass monolith blown by local master John Ditchfield to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his company Glasform, on a clear day its subtly dazzling refraction of the sunlight glows in awesome contrast against the earthy browns and greens of the English northeast. For the many visitors who encounter it while visiting the crumbling holiday Mecca each year, it is a bewilderingly abstract distraction.
For locals like Henry Cox, however, it has become a beloved landmark emblematic of the shimmering strangeness of the seaside. And as the Boston Manor frontman explains today, its influence on fifth album Sundiver extends far beyond Nick Barkworth’s striking cover photo.
“I’ve been driving past that sculpture for about 20 years,” he says of his hometown’s landmark. “I still do every time I go to practice. It’s this big, shiny, slightly chromatic thing – exploding, but undefinable. When I think of certain songs or lyrics from Sundiver, it’s at the front of my mind. It embodies a cold but bright energy, like looking down a hot street on a sunny day and seeing it blur into wavy lines at the horizon. That’s the visual we were trying to channel into sound.”
Rewind four years. When Boston Manor started out on the journey that would lead to this point, they were still in the depths of darkness. Superb third LP GLUE had dropped to hugely positive response, but it was suffocated by the treacly stasis of lockdown. With the future uncertain and time on their hands for experimenting, they set to work on what Henry envisioned as “an album in two parts”. It was to be part diary, part wish for the future.
Chapter one would become 2022’s Datura. Conceptually chronicling the journey from dusk to dawn, it was a record reflective of the empty streets and shut businesses of Blackpool in winter. Its bold emphasis on electronic and experimental sounds were hallmarks of a band processing personal and sociopolitical demons, from addiction and mental health to the grim politics of the UK today.
Bolder still was the reassurance that Sundiver’s part two – like Datura, to be written in relative real time – would document a journey back into light, a recovery that was by no means guaranteed. Healthier, happier, and with Henry and drummer Jordan Pugh having both become fathers over its creative process, and guitarists Mike Cunniff and Ash Wilson, and bassist Dan Cunniff in high spirits, it’s a promise fulfilled.
Was the key to that the album’s self-determination to get better?
“That’s it on the nose, really,” Henry smiles. “It’s been a hugely transitional period. A lot of it was willing this change into existence: putting our money where our mouths were, saying, ‘We’re making this album now, and it’s got to be genuine, so we’ve got to sort our shit out.’ It’s not about how we fixed everything, or how it’s all hunky-dory. It’s about the process, about how you can change any situation that you’re in. You are in control of your own destiny. There’s always a way out. There’s always going to be a tomorrow, a dawn, a spring, a next year. The will to change and the will to improve is an overarching theme. At points the concept was a total rod for our backs, but at others it was like a wind at our back pushing us on, helping the record write itself.”
From churning out a gargantuan 260 first-draft songs over a year-long writing process, to stepping out of the London comfort-zone with longtime producer Larry Hibbitt to record in Welwyn Garden City, every effort was made to drive the vision. But as keystone single Sliding Doors (named after the 1998 dual-timeline romcom of the same name) underlines, finding peace also involved acceptance of the fact that life is a balance between that self-determination and the whims of fate.
“It’s a bit too easy to surrender everything to destiny and it’s a bit too [conceited] to assume that everything is under your control,” Henry shrugs. “Look at people’s privilege. Some think it’s down to sheer hard work. Some insist that it’s preordained by God. It’s easy for me to say that my band was DIY for three years and we toured eight months out of 12 in our little red postal van and that’s why we’ve had success. But we’ve grown up in a developed nation in the 21st century with fairly stable means, too. And we’ve had a bit of luck along the way.
“Yes, it’s come with a lot of hard work. But, in the end, the right people heard our music early on and gave us a record deal. So it’s arrogant to think that you’re in control of everything, but lazy to think that you’re not in control of anything.”
Early in the conceptual roadmapping for Datura and Sundiver, it was pitched that individual moments on record would reflect specific hours of the day. Some fragments still fit. Datura (Dawn), for instance, with its glimmering opening lyrics ‘Could you please open the window / Let the new world in’ delivers the dewy wonder of sunrise, while HEAT ME UP surges in like a late-morning temperature spike. But with the project completed, Henry sees it more as a three-act structure.
“The close of Datura is the end of the first act,” Henry nods. “We’ve taken a bit of a downturn. Scene change. Second album. Then there’s another shift between Side A and Side B. We’ve run into a challenge we need to overcome, and we’re starting to cycle back towards the start. We’ve talked about Sundiver being the brighter, more positive of the pair, but it isn’t just a typically happy-sounding record.
“Happiness is such a flat emotion. It’s just not Boston Manor. We needed there to be an ebb and flow, this feeling of striving towards a resolution at the end of it all.”
Indeed, the path through Sundiver is all the more fascinating for not being a route one sugar rush. Container and the aforementioned HEAT ME UP are two of the biggest songs they’ve ever written, full of crashing riffs and colossal hooks, but they’re flickers in a greater sonic mirage.
Horses In A Dream is built on a slinking R&B bassline, treading a razor’s edge between seduction and menace. Instrumental midway pivot Morning Star – named after neither Lucifer, the American vegan brand, nor the socialist newspaper, apparently – contrasts sharply with Datura’s interstitial track Shelter From The Rain. It’s more “PS1 loading screen” than “sombre, healing moment”. Why I Sleep and Fornix lean more heavily into the band’s lifelong Deftones influence than ever before, balancing anguish, uncertainty and euphoria with a dexterity Chino Moreno and co. would applaud. Then Dissolve veers right into lithe-hipped alt.pop territory like a musical happy hour on the final straight towards sunset.
It’s as the light bleeds out of Sundiver’s sky that it’s most intriguing. Penultimate highlight What Is Taken, Will Never Be Lost is a haunting rumination on Henry’s final visits to his dying grandfather (whose face was on the cover of Boston Manor’s first EP Driftwood a decade ago), reliving scenes in the hospice where the temperature was always low, the lights always on and someone always trying to push visitors back out the door. It’s far from miserabilist, though, reckoning on the remembrance that comes with a personal sunset.
“I started to demo that song when I was quite sad, quite upset,” the frontman remembers. “But I was still writing after my grandfather passed, as I was helping clear out his apartment. Looking through his things – all these photos and diaries – I was finding out about the richness of his life I’d never known about. It was just a few weeks before my daughter was born, too, and I found myself really thinking about the cyclical nature of things, be that the seasons of the year, day and night, the decisions we make, or even life itself.”
Bookended by the observation, ‘It resets and starts again,’ stark closer DC Mini follows the spiral. “It’s entirely dealer’s choice whether that reset is a good or bad thing,” Henry rolls his shoulders, gesturing that it could as easily be about a pattern of bad decisions as humanity’s ability to endure.
Pulling together threads of disparate influence from The Cranberries and The Neighbourhood to Backstreet Boys and Portishead, it sees a blackgaze-inflected crescendo of the unsettling sonic “tension” that runs throughout, for which they even developed a new guitar pedal with Life Is Unfair Audio – now available for fans to order. And with Heriot singer/guitarist Debbie Gough dropping in to deliver lyrics that Henry still isn’t sure of, it is symbolic of Boston Manor’s desire to break free from any pigeonholes they’ve been forced into. They need, instead, to push at musical horizons and to bridge sonic divides to connect with like minds, not on stylistic but philosophical terms.
Following autumn 2024’s biggest-ever UK headline run, plans that have been in motion for years will come to fruition – with news on that to come. And for one-time ‘emo’ also-rans, it’s a loud, proud milestone from a genuinely unique band.
“We’ve existed as something of an island for a long time now,” Henry says, looking into the distance as he prepares to take his leave. “But we want to use that as an advantage. We can squeeze into a lot of arenas, be that playing with pop bands in the UK, with metal bands in Europe, or with emo bands in the States, and we want to use that to build our own culture, strengthening threads between bands that are about more than just genre.
“My greatest ambition for Sundiver is that the people with a preconceived notion about Boston Manor actually check it out,” he finishes. “I love this record. I believe in it. So it’s got to have the opportunity to be heard by the audience that it deserves.”
Sundiver is out now via SharpTone. Boston Manor are on tour in the UK now. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.
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