Tickets to see UK songsmith at Dublin’s 3Arena go on sale next Friday, 20th September at 10am.
David Gray today announces his forthcoming album Dear Life, which arrives on 17th January, 2025 via Gray’s independent label, Laugh A Minute Records.
He launches the album alongside its lead single, ‘Plus & Minus’, and unveils plans for a forty-one date world tour, which includes Dublin’s 3Arena on 5th April. For more dates, please see here.
Dear Life marks Gray’s thirteenth studio album. As the singer notes, it is the result of “a starburst of songwriting … it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind. The doubting voices didn’t turn up.
“It’s an album of emotional turmoil and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic and science, loss and acceptance.”
While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.
With the taster ‘Plus & Minus’, listeners can chart the singer’s lyrical shift themselves on this immediately infectious song. The track’s piano refrain frames a duet about a fractured relationship, in which his inimitable voice trades expressions of disillusionment and pain with emerging artist Talia Rae, whose smoky vocal simultaneously evokes equal measures of wit and despondence.
“‘Plus & Minus’ is based in part on a chord sequence that was born way back in 2004, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it has taken all those long, intervening years to fully resolve it,” Gray adds. “It’s an unusual sort of song for me to write in that it’s an out-and-out three minute pop song.
“In a slightly ‘Babylon’ style, it revolves around the same idea three times. In ‘Babylon’, we had Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Here we have ‘You know the way desire is … You know the way the light is … You know the way that time is.’ I could see that from the word go.
“It’s so full of hooks both lyrically and melodically that it needed a tight arrangement to really optimise their value. This took a LOT of work to get right, but we got there in the end…even if the end was 20 years on from the beginning!”
An array of personal and worldwide events informed the album’s evolution. Its foundations were etched in 2019, but progress came to a halt with the pandemic as well as a subsequent need to twice reschedule his huge White Ladder anniversary tour.
Revisiting those songs was a reminder of the classic songcraft and electronic undercurrent that made them so memorable, yet David was also compelled to ambitiously broaden his palette, working with producer Ben de Vries to create dazzlingly rich orchestral strings, horns and woodwind arrangements to correspond with the scale of the themes. A change of location was also a factor, with much of the album recorded and helmed in a makeshift studio in Norfolk.
“A lot has happened to me,” Gray continues. “There’s been change on so many levels, all the ups and downs and dramas and tragedies and joys that the slow movement through life brings.
“This record has been a reckoning with stuff that’s been building up like static for years. But I say this with joy and a smile on my face. I know what I’ve done is as good as anything I could possibly do.”
Dear Life is available to pre-order and pre-save here.
The Past & Present Tour will commence in January 2025, and will bring David Gray to Dublin for an unforgettable 3Arena concert.
Pre-sale tickets will be available starting at 10am on Tuesday, September 17th and will remain live until remaining tickets go on general sale at 10am on Friday, September 20th. To gain access to the pre-sale, sign up for David Gray’s newsletter here.
