It is probably fair to call No Devotion a supergroup. When their first single literally dropped out of nowhere exactly one year ago, it’s safe to say that most of the world was caught off guard. Geoff Rickly, the Brooklyn-based former Thursday frontman, had been keeping busy in the public eye with his politically satirical punk outfit United Nations without any indication that he’d been working on anything else — much less a new band with the former musical base of Lostprophets, one of the UK’s most successful rock bands of the decade. There was even less indication of a life after Lostprophets: For Stuart Richardson, Richard Jamie Oliver, Mike Lewis, Lee Gaze, and Luke Johnson, stepping out of the public life altogether was a personal necessity. But the arrival of Stay proved that this collaboration was as vital as it embraced. The end result is Permanence, their debut album to be released on September 25th via Collect Records.
Mixed by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, MGMT, Cut Copy, Thursday) and produced by Stuart Richardson and Alex Newport (Bloc Party, Frank Turner, The Mars Volta), this is the sound of a band not only liberated from their pasts, but perhaps liberated by them. Slates finally clean, No Devotion have refined those early flirtations with nostalgic pop-noir to find themselves at the intersection of post-punk heart and contemporary tricknology. It’s an album as aggressively rhythmic as the singles are unrepentantly melodic — a development powered by the band’s recently departed drummer Luke Johnson and founding Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong, who split the drum duties on this record.
