Blood Red Shoes - GHOSTS ON TAPE (2022)

After years spent living on opposite sides of the Atlantic world events threw Laura Mary Carter and Steven Ansell of Blood Red Shoes back together into what has become the must fruitful era of their 17 years together. 'It's been a loooong time since we both lived in the same city', explains Steven. 'I mean we actually wrote this album in LA at Laura's place, then came to the UK to record it'and then everything went nuts'. It appears that like David Lynch's The Lost Highway, nothing is linear in the world of Blood Red Shoes. Written and recorded before their most recent EP, GHOSTS ON TAPE is a huge jump into new terrain for the band. Musically and emotionally their most mature work, it is a complex, imaginative, and very gothic development on their sound. Musically, it leaves almost no trace of their former selves. 'We've always been outsiders right from the very beginning' says Steven. 'This album is really about us asserting ourselves as our own little island', he adds Obsessed by true crime and murder podcasts, many songs on the record are told in character and explore the dark psyche of those at the pinnacle of outsiderdom: serial killers. GHOSTS ON TAPE paints a picture of a dark and unsettling world. It is the sound of a unified and confident duo who know exactly who they are, even if the wider world doesn't really get it. The sound of two people who have spent their entire adult lives making music together and who, more than than ever, are finding new pathways for their creativity.