Pete Fij has released his new solo album ‘Up’s The New Down’ through Tip Top Records, along with a new single and video for ‘Complicated’.

For anyone who first came across him fronting Adorable in the early 1990s, the title makes a certain amount of sense. Fij has spent a fair bit of his career writing about melancholy, loss and the aftermath of relationships. This time he wanted to shake things up.

After the end of a long-term relationship, a spell working in a care home during the pandemic, and later working as a funeral celebrant, he decided he needed what he calls a reset. The electric guitar came back out, the tempos went up, and somewhere along the way he fell in love again.

‘Complicated’ probably gets closest to the more physical side of that change.

“I wanted to get that feral energy of pent up passion, and post-punk guitars seemed to be the best medium to express that,” Fij says.

The guitars are certainly sharper than on some of his more recent work, but the song still has the melodic pull that has followed him since Adorable. There is no great attempt to disguise the past either. The fuzz and dream-pop elements are still there, only now mixed with pop, electronica and a bit more bite.

‘Up’s The New Down’ follows a long and rather stop-start musical history. After Adorable, Fij formed Polak with his brother Krzys, then stepped away from music before returning with House of Love guitarist Terry Bickers for ‘Broken Heart Surgery’ in 2014 and ‘We Are Millionaires’ three years later.

Adorable briefly reunited in 2019 for a run of sold-out shows, then disappeared again almost as quickly.

The new album finds Fij back on his own, and sounding much less interested in keeping everything downcast. Earlier singles ‘Love’s Coming Back’, ‘Cuckoo’, ‘Don’t Bring Me Sunshine’ and ‘Wake Up Honey’ already hinted at that change.

Across ten tracks, ‘Up’s The New Down’ moves between fuzzed guitars, pop melodies and electronic touches without making too much fuss about where one thing ends and another begins.

Fij will spend October playing dates around the UK, including shows in Norwich, Lincoln, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Kingston, Salford and Brighton.

Headline credit: Lorna Allan

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