Ian McCulloch says the band Echo and the Bunnymen are in their pomp again

Ian McCulloch has never been short of a claim, and the new Echo and the Bunnymen album has given him a fresh set. Speaking to The Quietus about Apples For Isaac, the singer describes a band in a resurgence, playing with passion, with everything and everyone clicking onstage, which is not the standard vocabulary of a group nearly five decades into its life.

He reframes the origin myth while he is at it. "We were at Will's dad's house and we had two guitars," he said of the moment the band began, recalling that he declared them the greatest band in the world on the spot and that Will Sergeant scoffed. McCulloch's position is that it came true. The band formed in 1978 in Liverpool, and the interview keeps circling back to that city and to the 1970s as his real creative reference point.

The record itself is built on short songs and a reverb he describes as deliberately not posh or clean. Sergeant's guitar drives "Brussels Is Haunted", "The Light That Surrounds You", "Hijacked" and "Asimov", and Sergeant told the interviewer the runs came from ideas he had lying around in his head and filed away. "Hijacked" is the laddish one, closer in spirit to the band's 1990s comeback record Evergreen.

The drumming is Clem Burke's, and the Blondie drummer's death gives the album a weight it did not set out to carry. McCulloch says he nailed mortality on "Unstoppable Force", a ballad he calls possibly the greatest thing he has ever done in terms of a concise, perfect song. Elsewhere the record turns outward: he describes a conversation with a higher power, and says the bad now seems to outweigh the good, with wars everywhere and violence in the street.

He is unimpressed by the technology industry, telling the interviewer that the people building artificial intelligence have not done their apprenticeship and should learn to carve wood first. "Lab Rats Ran" carries a saxophone part, unusual for the band, and a set of heroes: Pele, Shakespeare and Elvis Presley, the last of whom appears in a line about a fifth Cornetto that McCulloch expects critics to challenge on factual grounds. His answer is that it is a line, and lines are allowed.

The lead single is a love letter to Brussels, a city that took the band in during 1980 and still turns out for them. "Brussels understands the melancholy in my head," McCulloch said, framing it as something other than morbid. That first Belgian trip is documented in Sergeant's second book, Echoes.

He is also braced for the argument that his voice has declined, and answers it by way of David Bowie's remark that he wished he had recorded Station To Station dry. McCulloch's reading is that you should not talk down your own work, and that comparing his voice now to his voice then is a category error because he is the one living in his throat. He says his voice is better than it has ever been.

The band's return sits inside a broader wave of rock and indie veterans back in circulation, with acts such as Alabama Shakes returning after a decade away and Aqueous reuniting for their first shows since 2023. What separates McCulloch's version is that he is not framing it as a comeback at all. He is arguing the band were always this good.