Helicon & Al Lover share new single 'Backbreaker', from incoming album 'Arise' out Feb 13th
Glasgow band Helicon and Los Angeles-based producer/DJ Al Lover are today releasing new single ‘Backbreaker’ – the second taste of their incoming collaborative album, ‘Arise’. Due out February 13th 2026 on Fuzz Club, you can pre-order the LP here
“Backbreaker came from a desire to fuse sounds we’d never really heard living side by side”, says Helicon frontman John-Paul Hughes: “Middle Eastern guitars paired with a melodic bassline that sits somewhere between Motown and indie rock; eastern strings and percussion rubbing up against sub-basses and breakbeats; chanting harmonies woven through Helicon’s psychedelia, Al’s sampler work, and Tony Doogan’s production. It’s a track you can listen to thirty times and still find something new; some independent melody, texture, or rhythm hiding in the layers. It’s a beautiful melting pot of moving, colliding sounds.”
Helicon’s Declan Welsh adds: "Lyrically, it’s a simple poem about how love, despite the agony, is a pleasant pain and that it is a ‘privilege all the same to feel it when I hear your name’. It’s a mantra, something said to yourself when you are in the midst of a doomed spell of hopeless affection. That even if all it is is the overwhelming feeling, that feeling is one of life’s greatest experiences in and of itself."
On his contribution to ‘Backbreaker’, Lover says: “This one was especially fun for me. I grew up going to drum & bass parties in my late teens and early twenties. It was never a huge part of my identity, but I always loved the music. As I dug deeper into the genre, the importance of the Amen break and how entire branches of electronic music were built around that single drum pattern. It all became endlessly fascinating. Blending that world with rock has been done before, but not quite in the way we approached ‘Backbreaker’. The aggression and intensity of both genres fit naturally together, and the psychedelic edge that emerges when they collide feels like its own new space.”
