Formed in New York in 2000, Liars have always been a shapeshifting, alien presence at the edges of contemporary music. From the shifty dance-punk of 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top to a string of radically inventive albums - including 2006’s Drums Not Dead, 2017’s TFCFand 2021’s The Apple Drop - Liars have never stood still. The Apple Drop was released as lockdowns made touring impossible and, for the first time since he was a teenager, Angus stopped thinking about making another record. Instead, he threw himself into other projects: founding the record label No Gold and experimental music platform Essential Tremors. “Both of those things were really about listening,” he says, “stepping back from being a full-time creator and connecting with these other artists”. Through both projects, he also began “listening and responding to the environment in Kalamazoo.”
After the longest period of his career without making music, Angus eventually realised something strange had happened: he had been making an album the whole time. He just hadn’t created any sound yet. He was not interested in making a traditional political album, or in turning the record into a soapbox for a particular cause. Instead, he became interested in the absurdity of the bureaucracy surrounding these struggles, and in the imbalance of power that allows corporations to exert influence across so many levels of everyday life. “It’s got more to do with the perception of things than modern pollution – how these things that can be a constant in your life become sort of ingrained and invisible.”
The album was written and recorded between the States and Australia, where Angus now resides. Reuniting with avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell - both collaborators on The Apple Drop and touring partners since TFCF - the three musicians brought an intuitive working language to the sessions. Rather than arriving with finished songs, they relied on trust, improvisation and reaction - allowing ideas to evolve across continents without losing their centre of gravity.
A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans ultimately becomes a different kind of political album – not only concerned with protest, but also with what it costs a person to keep on fighting. “It wasn't just the environment that was polluted,” Angus says. “It was also my mind.”
Liars recently played a series of sold out shows across Europe, and premiered the 20th anniversary performance of Drum’s Not Dead at Unsound Festival. They will play four Drum’s Not Dead shows at Phoenix Central Park, Sydney on 26 & 27 November, before returning to the UK / Europe in 2027 in the spring. A date has been announced for London’s Village Underground on 15 May, with more details to follow.
A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans will be released on recycled eco-green vinyl, CD and digitally
via Mute on 5 March