The first new music from Hard-Fi since 2014 - taken from the band’s forthcoming EP of the same name.
The band’s 2005 debut album Stars Of CCTV had immediate success reaching no 1 in the UK, going double platinum and was Mercury Prize-shortlisted. The band have a catalogue of evergreen classics with over 144.3M total streams. A headline November tour announced - with a 2022 show at London’s Kentish Town Forum selling out in 10 minutes & over 14k tickets sold on their subsequent 2023 tour.
Hard-Fi make their welcome return with brand new single ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’ on Ignition Records. Their first new material in ten years, the track marks the first taste of an EP of brand new songs, as well as a big UK headline tour this November.
Rolling around a sun-scorched groove and boisterous beats, ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’ is an immediate, soul-infused summer anthem, recorded at the band’s own Staines studio, produced by frontman Richard Archer and long-term contributor Wolsey White. It’s the end result of the first session together since 2011 album Killer Sounds and follows a series of sold-out tours and live shows over the last 18 months.
As with many of the band’s songs, there is a thought-provoking depth behind Hard-Fi’s pop sensibility. The song’s defiant themes were initially inspired by the UK Government’s attempts to criminalise many aspects of popular protest through the 2022 Public Order Act, while the issue has been thrown into even sharper focus over the last year as police and people have repeatedly clashed on streets around the globe.
“Don’t Go Making Plans is sort of a protest song about protest, but I wanted to encapsulate that message into something that was still a pop song,” Archer explains. “A track that you can still dance to in a club or play on the radio, because a song like that you can make a real connection to and circumnavigates the pointless restrictions being put in our way.
Governments passing laws to stop protests that ‘cause more than minor disruption’ feels like something out of a dystopian film. The whole point of protest is disruption. You’re trying to interrupt the inevitable flow of things, to encourage the people running the country to think again, especially when you have a government that doesn’t seem to be bothered by what people actually need.”
