Boston Manor are sharing new single ‘Sliding Doors,’ their second new song of 2024 and one that rides waves of spiking distortion and cuts rich grooves as it goes. ‘Sliding Doors’ portrays the sometimes seismic impact that the seemingly innocuous actions in our day-to-day lives can have. It’s a song that in many ways leads right back to the start of Boston Manor.
Lead singer Henry Cox says: “‘Sliding Doors’ is named after that movie of the same name. I called it that because when we were writing it I started thinking about all of the decisions that I’ve made that have led me to the life I have and how circumstantial a lot of it is. It got me thinking about how Boston Manor started. I’d had a few conversations with Dan and Mike Cunniff (who I barely knew at the time) about starting a band. But at that time I was in art school in a different city and I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I was also starting like two other bands with different people so I figured it was just something that you talk about.”
In a world full or disorder and chaos, all we can do sometimes is respond to what’s laid out in front of us. The results may be unpredictable, glorious or devastating, but as possibility and opportunity present themselves one moment, hide themselves the next, it’s how we react at those junctures that leads us on our ultimate pathway. Expanding, Cox says: “I’d gone home to visit my parents for the weekend and had taken a bus up to north shore to go and visit a friend, I was on my way home and the bus basically crashed. It wasn’t bad, no one was hurt or anything but I had to get off. It was super late and buses basically stop running at that time in parts of Blackpool. I had been texting Mike and it turned out the bus had crashed at the bottom of his street, so I just went round to his. We basically ended up writing the first song from our demo that night. We played our first show a few weeks later. If that car hadn’t pulled out on that bus, we probably never would’ve started Boston Manor & been all the places we’ve been, I wouldn’t have met my wife & half of my friends. I don’t know if I would even be playing music now.”
‘Sliding Doors’ is a way for the band to recognize that as we go through life and make more choices, some versions of ourselves die away, and new versions emerge. Who we become may all be down to the roll of a dice.
This is explored in the accompanying video, as Cox comments: “We tried to reflect this in the music video, the idea being it’s loads of different realities, some of which I’m a musician some of which I’m doing something totally different. The die hard fans might recognize the final location which is where we shot our very first music video, long since scrubbed from the internet. In a way the band we’re in now feels like an alternate reality to the band we started. I look back at old videos and I barely recognize us!”
Upcoming tour dates:
April 5th – World HQ – Newcastle, UK
April 6th – Yellow Arch – Sheffield, UK
April 7th – The Caves – Edinburgh, UK
April 9th – Norwich Arts Centre – Norwich, UK
April 10th – Future Yard CIC – Birkenhead, UK
April 11th – O2 Academy – Oxford, UK
April 12th – Oslo Hackney – London, UK
June 19th – Chalk – Brighton, UK
June 25th – Reithalle – Dresden, Germany
June 26th – Hydrozagadka – Warsaw, Poland
June 27th – Rock Cafe – Prague, Czechia
June 21st – Hurricane Festival – Germany
June 22nd – Southside Festival – Germany
June 23rd – Full Force Festival – Germany
June 29th – Vainstream Festival – Germany
June 30th – Jera on Air – Netherlands
July 10th – 2000 Trees Festival – UK
July 11th – 2000 Trees Festival – UK