Northern Irish alt-rock outfit Snow Patrol broke into the mainstream with their 2003 major-label debut Final Straw, followed up with the multi-platinum success of 2006's Eyes Open, which featured the international hit single "Chasing Cars," and continued with two more multi-platinum records, A Hundred Million Suns (2008) and Fallen Empires (2011). After a six-year hiatus, the band returned with the UK Top Ten album Wildness in 2018.

Now comprising the trio of Nathan Connolly, Gary Lightbody, and Johnny McDaid, the band have emerged from the process of writing and recording their extraordinary new album, The Forest is the Path (September 13th 2024), perhaps a little battered, but maybe, just maybe, a little wiser and certainly more humble from the experience.

Love, loss, regret, self-doubt, denial, delusion: anyone afflicted by any of these experiences, emotions and afflictions - and isn’t that all of us? - might be well advised to gird themselves before listening to Snow Patrol’s new album. It’s not a record for the faint-hearted, to be sure - but it may just be a salve for the heart that hurts.

Lyrically, it’s by far the most laid-bare and most unsparing of the band’s albums (which is saying something). Phrases leap out and ambush you, constantly. “I’m only lost if you don’t look for me.” “I’m not going to lie to you anymore, after these lies. Then no more.” “I want to be in love without being loved in return.” “I’ve told myself a million times who you weren’t, so I can finally forget who you were.” “Love is just pain in reverse.”

As those lyrics suggest, The Forest is the Path is an album rooted in reflection, introspection and interrogation. One of its key building blocks, says Gary, was the idea of love from the distance of time. “I was going on really long walks and just having these ideas and then diving down into them. 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. That’s not something I’d previously thought about as a way 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 no longer have access to it. And when it’s 10 years later, you’re standing in Brooklyn, looking across the East River at the Manhattan skyline.”

It’s a theme addressed unblinkingly and unflinchingly on the album’s first single, The Beginning, a song that builds from a Bryan Ferry-like verse to a huge chorus that will be incendiary live. “That’s kind of a summing up of this album,” Gary continues. “It’s a way of looking at various mistakes, the hurt that I 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 you’ve got gloves on.”

“Seamus Heaney said, a few years before he died, that he was still finding out what poems meant that he’d written 30 or 40 years before. As soon as I heard that, something was unlocked inside me. Like, I get it now. I’m not supposed to know. And that’s kind of what this album is about.” He looks at Nathan and Johnny. “These two gentlemen here were responsible for so much. Those moments on the album that make your heart soar way, way above you, like a fucking halo. The architecture and the landscape are so crucial on this album. They elevate it beyond anything we’ve done before.

Snow Patrol Acoustic

Performers