News

The Human League Reveal Album Artwork And Tracklisting

27th Jan 2011

Not surprisingly for a group who were famously described by David Bowie in 1979 as “the sound of the future”, The Human League have never been about resting on their laurels or relying on past glories to see them through. Which is why, in March 2011, they will be releasing their ninth studio album Credo, as brilliant a distillation of their ideas about pop and dancing, glamour and electronics, as anything they have ever done.

Produced by fellow Sheffield pop experimentalists I Monster, Credo’s style is a refinement of the approach first adopted by The Human League thirty years ago when they first led an experimental art-school insurgency of radical futuristic ideals into the top ten. Songs like ‘Don’t You Want Me’ or ‘Love Action’ that are both hummable shiny pop anthems for dispossessed teens and menacing electronic three minute future shocks, nothing less than radical pop subterfuge.

Credo’s eleven tracks still bear all of the classic ‘League synth pop hallmarks but are as modern as the sharpest 21st century chart pop. ‘Never Let Me Go’ is an ecstatic album opener, with the ‘League still straddling the high street and the art house effortlessly, like Girls Aloud joining Kraftwerk, the sound of a Top Shop branch staffed entirely by robots.

The first single on an album full of potential hits is ‘Night People’, another outrageously catchy burst of suburban disco pop with some of the urban nocturnal drama of ‘Sound Of The Crowd’, the girls’ voices as ever proving you don’t have to bellow and blare to emote. ‘Sky’ paints a picture every bit as evocative as your favourite acoustic troubadour. ‘Got To Do’ manages to be as weird and utterly irresistible with its reference to “startled simians” harking back to the “sericulture” of Being Boiled. Even the titles – ‘Single Minded’, ‘Electric Shock’ – are immediate and striking. As ever, there is brightness here, with a feeling of danger encroaching onto the dancefloor.

Above all, Credo manages to makes itself heard above the brashest state-of-the-art pop productions and brings some of that primitive essence to the milieu, as well as The Human League’s unique quality of apartness.

“We’re peculiar,” says Susan. “People think pop music is X Factor and we’re still hankering after a Roxy-Bowie-Donna Summer-Chic version of pop. We don’t fit in. There are three of us, two of whom have never written a song and are pretty average singers, plus we’ve got a lead singer who doesn’t consider himself a singer at all and can’t play any instruments very well. And yet we still think of ourselves as a pop group. If a market research group got hold of us, they’d change absolutely everything. We shouldn’t have gone on as long as we have – we should have ‘gone rock’ by now, like Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and U2 did. But we’re still a pop group.”

Not just a pop group – possibly the last great pop group. Believe.

Track listing:
1. Never let Me Go
2. Night People
3. Sky
4. Into The Night
5. Egomaniac
6. Single Minded
7. Electric Shock
8. Get Together
9. Privilege
10. Breaking The Chains
11. When The Stars Start To Shine