All The Days
All The Days marks the long-awaited return of The Devlins, one of Ireland’s best-loved rock bands.
The album, released on Blue Élan Records October 4, is the first full-length project from brothers Colin (vocals, guitar, piano) and Peter Devlin (bass), (drummer) Guy Rickarby and (guitarist) Mark Murphy since their critically-acclaimed Waves album.
Across 11 new tracks, producer Rob Kirwan (Hozier, PJ Harvey, Depeche Mode) helms the solid rhythms and intricate songwriting of The Devlins’ classic lineup, evoking a fresh sound from a modern rock band who captured a worldwide audience with its cinematic hits and magnetic live performances.
The Devlins released their debut, Drift, on Capitol Records in 1993 straight out of university, winning rave reviews and four stars in Rolling Stone, followed by 1997’s Waiting, 2002’s Consent and a dozen song placements in blockbuster films and high-profile TV soundtracks including the multi-platinum selling Batman Forever Soundtrack, Six Feet Under and Closer.
With Peter in Dublin pursuing a career in radio and production, Colin continued making music a continent away in Los Angeles, releasing the solo album Democracy of One in 2009, winning “Best Irish Male” at the Meteor Music Awards in 2010, and co-writing several tracks on Janiva Magness’s 2016 album Love Wins Again — which earned him a Grammy® nomination. A second album, High Point, followed in 2018.
The Devlins reunited for a sold-out show in Dublin in 2019 with the promise of new music on the horizon, but it took the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic to draw the four of them together again to create All The Days.
Bringing the past into present— and future— tense
All The Days is a powerful reintroduction to the band’s atmospheric sound and to Colin Devlin’s nuanced tenor voice and perceptive storytelling. New listeners will wonder why they hadn’t discovered the Devlins sooner.
Peter Devlin says the music has a “four guys in a room” approach and “a very organic and real and live feel, which is missing in a lot of music now.” “It was important for us to make this record together as a band because Mark and Guy bring so much of their own individual musical personalities and styles to what we do. We recorded everything pretty much live in Camden Studios in Dublin with Rob engineering as well as producing. He also mixed the entire album so there’s a continuity there”.
“Colin had written a set of songs that we all felt would make a great Devlins record,” say’s guitarist Mark Murphy. “The new album has a lot of space on it. There are no in your face guitar solos, it’s all about the driving rhythm section and letting the songs shine through. It’s raw. I think it’s the band’s most honest album yet”.
The uplifting title single sets the tone for the album’s themes of resilience, holding onto innocence and navigating human connections.
“All the days fade into one / And all the days when you were lost can never be won / Angel of mercy, where are you now?” Colin sings. A syncopated backbeat, lush synths and rhythm guitars drive the opening verse.
“It’s an emotional and uplifting song that deals with time passing, with accepting and letting go” says Colin. “It deals with resilience and holding on to the magic and the light. And of course, there are conversations with angels and the big questions…It also has superb production by Rob Kirwan which hits me every time. It’s one of the strongest songs The Devlins have ever recorded and we hope that as many people as possible get to hear it”.
Peter says the song “stood out for all four of us and for Rob. It just seems to strike a chord, and maybe it’s just that shared experience of lockdown loss, but also empathy for what other people are going through.”
“The Frozen River” and “Show Me Tomorrow” are about living life in the present and remembering to take care of yourself while also caring for those who came before and will come after.
“With both our parents dying [in the past few years] and being faced with your own mortality, it’s like, ‘How long have I got left?’” Colin says of the songwriting process. “There’s a bit of Dylan Thomas’ ‘rage against the dying of the light’ element to it.”
“Dark Star” and “Holding On” dissect interpersonal relationships and the space between lovers, with the latter utilizing cathedral organ sounds and vocoder effects somewhere between ELO and Imogen Heap—a new avenue for Colin as a singer, in which he successfully explores the upper register of his voice.
“Future Ghost” echoes “I Knew That,” from Drift, with Colin speak-singing over a bluesy guitar riff; “Ruins” is an intriguing apocalyptic ballad with angular key changes that recall the work of the Velvet Underground.
“Slipping Through Your Hands” and “Mine” are what Peter calls part of the band’s “dark, minor-key open strings” category, the latest in a long line of Devlins moods (reminiscent of 1997’s “World Outside” or “Necessary Evil” from Drift) which give way to major-key melodies you can’t get out of your head.
For Colin, “Slipping Through Your Hands” is a note to himself. “It’s about time passing and reconnecting and, you know, looking back, like ‘What have we got to show for it?’,” he says.
Peter says he played the song for his family in the car while on a holiday in France and asked one of his daughters to use her phone to film the tree-lined road stretching out before them in the sunshine. “I just noticed that everybody was nodding along, and I was listening and sort of grooving to it,” he says. “It was a nice moment, and I thought, ‘OK, everybody’s into this. This is a driving song,’”
“The Meadow” opens with a marching drumbeat and acoustic guitar. The music builds as the lyrics mine memories of youth at a time before innocence is lost. There is a dark undercurrent pierced by light. “Deliver us from evil,” the chorus begs. Jagged guitar notes emerge from a sea of voices in one of the album’s most sonically potent moments.
Colin says the song’s lyrics about “Eden born again before my weary eyes,” are about seeing things differently as you get older and seeing things through your children’s eyes.
“It’s more like a [tone] poem, it’s just repeated twice,” Colin says of the song’s metaphors and Talk Talk vibe. “A meadow is something that comes once a year and you know, it’s beautiful for a period, and then it’s gone. I wrote that during early Covid when no one really knew what was going on.”
As fathers, it’s impossible for Colin and Peter not to think of protecting their kids, despite the ways in which the world has changed since the Devlins first started making music. Making music together again is about passing the songs to the next generation.
“Music is something that can never be replaced,” Peter says. He often teaches his daughters how to play songs on guitar and recently jammed with his nephew, Colin’s 7-year-old son, who wanted to partake in creating the kind of distortion pedal sound he’d heard his dad creating for the album.
The Devlins’ journey is best encapsulated in “Behind the Sun,” another invigorating All The Days track about seizing the moment. The song billows into elation as a repeated piano note, drums and guitars play in double time: “Ocean rain, the man-machine, searching for a new gold dream, I see it, I see it, I’m trying to hold onto the feeling,” Colin sings. “Hold onto the feeling …when you were young, behind the sun.”
“It’s about accepting that you’re not—we’re not— 21 anymore,” Colin says. “We’re different people than we were when we started this. And I think it’s trying to embrace that and say, ‘Look, this is where we are, who we are now.’”