The Apartments
'In And Out Of The Light' New Album Out September 18
"Walsh's delicate acoustic guitar is colored in with warm trumpet and backing vocals" - Brookyln Vegan
"It’s not just classic Apartments, it’s classic songwriting, with the hopeful message wrapped up in keenly observed words and this devastatingly beautiful melody thats soaked in melancholy." - Backseat Mafia
Past praise for The Apartments;
“(...) emotionally profound, and maybe the most moving collection of songs I've heard in years. Untouchably great.” Dave DiMartino - Rolling Stone
"...Played with quiet grace, the eight chamber-pop songs here are alternatively harrowing and redemptive, anchored by loss.” Jon Dale - Uncut
“The Apartments have stunned us to a reverential silence. This
album is a pure heart-wrencher and should only be listened to after dark.” - Jane Wilkes, NME
“Taken together, 1985’s ‘the evening visits...’, 1993’s ‘drift’ and 1995’s ‘A Life Full Of
Farewells’ constitute the finest, most distinguished catalogue I’ve heard in the past decade or so”. - MOJO
Peter Milton Walsh and his band, The Apartments, are acclaimed by critics and fans alike all over the world. Peter Milton Walsh formed The Apartments in the Summer of 1978 in Brisbane, Australia. That same Summer, The Apartments singer/songwriter Peter Walsh also played lead guitar with The Go-Betweens, when they’d been offered an 8 album contract by Beserkley Records, home of Jonathan Richman. With the Beserkley deal falling through, Walsh left The Go Betweens who affectionately commemorated him with their next single, ‘Don't Let Him Come Back’. Grant McLennan famously said of their different personalities “Walsh is night, we are day. We’re sun, he’s rain.”
After leaving Australia for New York a few years later, Peter Milton Walsh then relocated to England after The Apartments were signed by legendary English record label Rough Trade. During the years of exile and the albums which followed, The Apartments developed an intense, devoted following throughout Europe and America. The Apartments' single, 'The Shyest Time', was scooped up by the maestro of American teen movies, John Hughes for his Some Kind of Wonderful, remixed by Stephen Hague, producer of the Pet Shop Boys and New Order.
As the Eighties came to a close, Walsh returned to his birthplace, Sydney, and began playing as The Apartments, this time with Ed Kuepper on guitar. In late 1992, The Apartments second album, 'drift' was recorded for the Dirty Three's first label, Torn & Frayed.
A string of albums followed in quick succession—'A Life Full Of Farewells' in 1995, 'fête foraine' in 1996 and 'apart' in 1997. The run of albums came to a halt in 1997 when Walsh’s young son was hospitalised in 1997 with a serious illness. With the death of his son in 1999, Walsh stopped The Apartments, withdrawing entirely from public life.
In 2015, The Apartments surprised fans by reemerging—after over a decade of silence—with No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, an album that saw a new audience drawn to The Apartments music. By year’s end, readers and critics of French music magazine Magic named No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal #1 Album of The Year.
Five years later, In and Out of the Light is the highly anticipated album that will once more appeal to existing fans and new ones as well. Listeners will again find themselves reflected in songs which, laced with the light of optimism, speak to situations all of us face and deal with at some point. The Apartments exquisite instrumentation and beautiful harmonies and Peter Milton Walsh’s impressionistic storytelling work together beautifully on In and Out of the Light. Here are eight songs to get lost in—for a day, for a week, for a lifetime.
The Apartments return with their seventh studio album 'In and Out of the Light', which is due out September 18. The songs follow a set of characters who, in the aftermath of loss or simply the changes that turn up in everyone’s lives, have gone looking for some other way to live—and found it. Stories with the texture of this experience float through the intimate, reflective songs on the album.
The album came together in a new way for The Apartments. Recording began in Sydney, at the end of winter of 2019. Working a few hours a day, one or two days a week, the album was finished in the summer, with the final mix completed the day before coronavirus lockdown hit Australia in 2020.
The songs took shape impressionistically across the recording days, with details of melodies, fragments of lyrics and hooks determining the form—a departure from the band’s usual way of building songs upon the a bedrock of bass and drums.
Peter Milton Walsh and bass player Eliot Fish worked with producer Tim Kevin in his Marrickville studio in Sydney, while French Apartments, Natasha Penot and Antoine Chaperon, recorded their parts in various studios in France. English drummer Nick Allum worked in London.
In and Out of the Light features Chris Abrahams from The Necks on piano. The vocal and piano for We Talked Through Till Dawn were recorded live in one take with Peter singing as Chris played piano. They had recorded the popular Apartments song, She Sings to Forget You, in this way before. Miro Bukovsky, who played on No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, again played flugelhorn and trumpet.
The Apartments exquisite instrumentation and beautiful harmonies and Peter Milton Walsh’s impressionistic storytelling work together beautifully on 'In and Out of the Light'. Here are eight songs to get lost in—for a day, for a week, for a lifetime.