Rock

Winter is coming. Well, Snow Patrol is anyway. The Northern Irish band announced their first new studio album in six years, The Forest Is the Path, on Thursday (May 30). The 12-track collection produced by Fraser T Smith (Adele, Stormzy) and the band was written by its three core members — guitarist/singer Gary Lightbody, guitarist Johnny McDaid and guitarist/vocalist Nathan Connolly.

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The follow-up to 2018’s Wildness is set for release on Sept. 13 on Polydor Records, with the first taste, “The Beginning,” out now. The yearning track features the trio’s signature melodic, dramatic thrum, with Lightbody crooning, “There is only you and me in this life/ And I don’t want to f–k it up now/ There is nothing for me in these past lives/ There is only what I wasn’t yet” on the swelling chorus.

In addition the core trio, Smith, Will Reynolds, Roy Kerr and Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen contributed to the songwriting on the album, with Lightbody providing the luminous album and single artwork.

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“We had a few wee ideas kicking about that would eventually be recorded and find their way onto the album but when Johnny and I found ourselves in the Somerset countryside about to start writing for this album in earnest ‘The Beginning’ was written on the very first day,” the band wrote on Instagram. “That’s why it’s called the beginning in fact. I tend to name songs before I write the lyrics. So if Johnny, Nathan and I are working on the music for a track it will generally have a placeholder name that will get changed once I write the lyrics, one that better reflects the words of the song. BUT in this case, even though there are probably better words and phrases (that actually appear in the song) to be used as titles, ‘The Beginning’ stuck.”

They continued, “This album took us on many uncharted routes, with sometimes weird and sometimes wonderful turns, and so it’s hard not to think of the start of this album as a new beginning. We honour the past, deeply. This is our thirtieth year, so we have an awful lot of it, past I mean. Tons of it. We have a profound love and respect for all who have been on this journey with us those many years. But while we honour the past we also want to cherish the present and look to the future. So this is the beginning of something, and we are so excited to share it with you all.”

In another statement, Lightbody said the album is rooted in “reflection, introspection and interrogation, with a key building block being the idea of looking at love from the distance of time passed. “I haven’t been in a relationship for a very long time, 10 years or more, so love from a distance to me meant the way a relationship sits in your memory from a distance of, say, 10 years,” he said. “That’s not something I’d previously thought about as away to write about love. So it’s like, when you’re in love, you’re standing in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When you’ve broken up with that person, you’re out in the street. You can still see the building, but you’re not in there anymore. And when it’s 10 years later, now you’re standing in Brooklyn looking at the Manhattan skyline.”

Lightbody added that the single sums up the album, calling it a way to look at “various mistakes, any pain I may have caused, from a place where nothing is hurting anymore, except the memory when you pull it back into your mind. The memory itself is full of hurt but everything around it isn’t. You’re holding in your hand this ball of fire, but now you’ve got gloves on.”

After a run of summer 2024 festival gigs, the band also announced the dates for an eight-show 2025 UK/Ireland arena tour as well as European and U.S. dates slated for January and February 2025; see the dates here.

Listen to “The Beginning” and see the cover and track listing below.

The Forest Is the Path tracklist:

1. All

2. The Beginning

3. Everything’s Here And Nothing’s Lost

4. Your Heart Home

5. This Is The Sound Of Your Voice

6. Hold Me In The Fire

7. Years That Fall

8. Never Really Tire

9. These Lies

10. What If Nothing Breaks?

11. Talking About Hope

12. The Forest Is The Path

Duane Betts says that he’s been “holding up” since the death of his father, Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts, on April 18 at the age of 80. And while he and Allman Betts Band partner Devon Allman — son of the late Allman Brothers leader Gregg Allman — don’t necessarily need more reason to pay tribute to their fathers’ musical legacy, Betts tells Billboard that there’s a different kind of charge in playing their songs now. 
“Now that he’s gone it changes it a little more,” acknowledges Betts, who was named after the late Duane Allman and played at times in his father’s post-Allman Brothers band, Great Southern. “I think the spirit is always with me, whether I’m playing those particular songs or I’m playing my own songs. He had kinda been in poor health for awhile, so I was already playing for him and getting a lot of inspiration (from) thinking about him and what his legacy means to me, personally. I love playing that music and really treasure it ’cause it’s precious. so it’s nice to play a few of their tunes and mix ’em with our originals I do with the Allman Betts Band or a Duane Betts show. 

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“And now that he’s moved on to the next level it’s kind of put the exclamation mark on that idea of showing love and appreciation for the music.”

Allman Betts has been mixing a variety of Allman Brothers Band tunes into its current spring tour, including selections such as “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” “Blue Sky,” “Jessica,” “Melissa,” “Midnight Rider,” “Dreams,” “Seven Turns” and “Sailin ‘Cross the Devil’s Sea,” as well as Allmans-popularized covers like Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out” and Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues.”

“That’s been rotating; it depends on what night it is, what you’ll hear,” Betts explains. “Y’know, I play the way I play; when I’d ask my dad, ‘Do I sound too much like you?’ he would say, ‘Well, you like the same food as me. You walk like me. You cough like me. You look like me. So why are you trying to not be you? Just be you and don’t worry about it.’”

Allman Betts’ tour runs through June 9 and is the band’s first since the 2023 death of drummer R. Scott Bryan, which brought Roy Orbison’s youngest son Alex “Orbi” Orbison — who played in two previous bands with Betts — into the lineup. (The group also includes another Allman Brothers progeny, bassist Berry Duane Oakley.) Betts says the septet has made a conscious effort to dig deep into its two album catalog for this trek. 

“We’re really enjoying switching up the set list quite a bit and throwing different things in there we haven’t played in awhile, so it’s been really fun,” he notes. “We’ve done songs off our records we haven’t played in years, ’cause we haven’t really been on tour.”

Another Allman Betts Band album — a follow-up to 2020’s Bless Your Heart — is another matter, however. 

“We haven’t really gotten that far,” says Betts, who released a solo album, Wild & Precious Life, last July. “I think right now we’re just keeping it as this, a live thing. We’re really grateful to be out there on the road, and being all together again is really fun. We have a few more shows later in the summer, and we’re just having a great time on tour and not thinking about anything else yet.”

The band’s next date is a show Thursday night (May 30) at The Fillmore in Detroit; click here to see their summer tour schedule.