There’s a swirling majesty to Slowdive’s latest album Everything Is Alive that almost demands serious listening, a preoccupation with grief colouring its forceful minor-chord arrangements and melodically whispered vocals. Recorded during the pandemic as band lead Rachel Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father passed away, it conveys both the unmovable anchor of bereavement while also offering a yearning plea that one day things will get better, rising tides of guitars providing ecstatic relief against the crushing blows of day-to-day life.

It’s tempting to imagine the recording session itself was loaded with the same heavy air as Everything Is Alive’s lyrics, but camaraderie within the band provided respite from the emotionally wrenching material they were creating. ‘The mood of our records is always fairly melancholic,’ bassist Nick Chaplin says, ‘but we’re not method actors that have to get into the studio and adopt a downbeat personality. We’re still really a bunch of idiots and so we still behave like teenagers. The grief obviously affected the record and it’s a bit difficult to square the circle sometimes, but it wasn’t a major challenge to record.’ 

Despite its slower pace and themes of parental loss, Everything Is Alive appears to have been embraced by the younger generation of fans who have flocked to the band’s earlier, more wistful material. During the gestation period between their comeback album Slowdive in 2015 and last year’s Everything Is Alive, this group of fiftysomethings have become an unlikely TikTok phenomenon, with songs like ‘When The Sun Hits’ going viral on the site. For a band prone to compositions that regularly break the six-minute mark, has this newfound success in a marketplace predisposed to short-form content changed how they write music?

‘The label were pushing us to frontload the record because people will play it on Spotify and only get three songs through even if they like it, as attention spans have become so short,’ says Chaplin. ‘We compromised a little bit, although not as much as they would have liked. But if you start getting involved in the ten-second chunk thing, you're not really producing anything of art that's worthwhile. That's not what we go into the studio to do.’

Disinterested in cheap thrills or cashing in on the current wave of 90s nostalgia, Slowdive’s commitment to remaining a relevant artistic force has so far kept them at arm’s length from the urge to revisit past glories that’s so prevalent among their peers. ‘We've always tried to avoid the current trend of legacy bills and position ourselves as a band putting new stuff out. And yes, the back catalogue is important, obviously, but I don't see us hooking up with other bands from the 90s to play shows. It's fun for the audience, I guess, but it's just not something we want to do.’

It’s unlikely we’ll be promoting any full-album shows from Slowdive quite yet, then. But with new material that sounds as creatively vital as any track from previous glories such as Souvlaki or Just For A Day, fans won’t be hankering for the past anytime soon. Although more than a few might be disappointed if they don’t hear ‘When The Sun Hits’ at the encore.

Slowdive are on tour from Friday 16–Tuesday 27 February.