British trio Portishead has been fairly quiet since their last album, Third, launched in 2008. Even more surprising, it’s been over a decade since the group has set foot in North America, reports Spinner.
The trio has enjoyed great success with the album, and is feeling the pressure from fans. Producer-instrumentalist Geoff Barrow revealed that the group plans to start writing new songs in January 2012 after their tour wraps.
“Hopefully, it will go okay and we can release another record," said Barrow. "It’s never easy to write music for us, it’s incredibly difficult. I find it a lot easier to write for other things. But there is this pressure with Portishead and it’s really not about our success – it’s just what Portishead means, I suppose."
Their last album Third took the group quite a while to write, confided Barrow, “…we used a lot of ideas on ‘Third,’ and that took a long time to create. It’s actually really difficult because I’ve got a short amount of time now to find these spaces and these kinds of calculations, basically, to make things interesting. There were an awful a lot of influences before ‘Third’ happened. Two years before that I was inundated with brilliant music and really switched on – and not so much now. So I’ve got to get into it again somehow.”
In July, Portishead announced plans for a North American tour this October, with stops in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Seattle, Vancouver, and Denver.