Pet Grief (Dinked Archive Edition #37)

The Radio Dept. have announced a twentieth-anniversary vinyl reissue of Pet Grief, their sophomore album and one of the most quietly distinctive records in their catalogue.

Originally released on 12 April 2006, Pet Grief emerged from a period of false starts and reinvention. The band had already recorded much of a more electronic album before deciding that it felt too close to what was happening around them at the time. They put most of it aside and began again, bringing guitars back into the process and reconnecting with some of the melodic instincts behind Lesser Matters. But the result was not a return to Lesser Matters. Instead, Pet Grief became its cleaner, more restrained counterpart: twelve songs built from soft-focus synthesisers, programmed rhythms, piano, strings and guitars allowed to shimmer rather than overwhelm. What initially seemed like a very pop record later revealed itself as something calmer, mellower and sadder.

Around the same time, music supervisor Brian Reitzell approached The Radio Dept. about contributing music to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. The film ultimately featured three earlier Radio Dept. songs, while some of the unused music developed during that period found its way into Pet Grief.

Pet Grief was also a deliberate attempt to escape the language that had formed around The Radio Dept.'s debut. Rather than repeat the distortion-heavy, reverb-soaked sound of Lesser Matters, Johan Duncanson and Martin Carlberg, credited at the time as Martin Larsson, looked towards a cleaner strain of 1980s pop, with Prefab Sprout, The Blue Nile and Pet Shop Boys among the reference points. Recorded and produced by the band themselves, Pet Grief remained rooted in the same fiercely independent idea that had guided them from the beginning: pop music made at home, without surrendering creative control. The title refers to the idea of grief as something one keeps close and tends to, almost like a pet. Rather than a passing emotion to be overcome, it becomes a familiar companion and part of one's way of seeing the world.

That atmosphere is present before the record even begins. The cover photograph was taken by Johan Duncanson's father, Alan Duncanson, at Skånes Djurpark in southern Sweden in the mid-1980s. Rediscovered years later among his parents' photographs, its kilts, cigarettes, children and slightly blurred distance became inseparable from the album's identity.

"The songs on Pet Grief are easy to fall in love with." PITCHFORK

"Amid all the darkness, shines a bright light." NME

"A sublime piece of work." IT'S A TRAP!

"Touring after Pet Grief was quite boring actually." JOHAN DUNCANSON

Side A

1. It’s Personal

2. Pet Grief

3. A Window

4. I Wanted You to Feel The Same

5. South Side

6. The Worst Taste in Music

Side B

7. Every Time

8. What Will Give?

9. Gibraltar

10. Sleeping In

11. Tell

12. Always a Relief