Hot on the heels of their recent reissues campaign, Spiritualized return with a new studio album, Everything Was Beautiful. Mainman Jason Pierce emerges from hibernation to discuss the band’s ninth record and his mission to make the music on it sound as natural as possible in an unnatural environment.

Words: Johnny Sharp

Home alone: part of Spiritualized’s latest album was created in solitude.

Images: Sarah Piantadosi

“If you’re making any kind of art, I think you should have a healthy fear of treading water. You have to feel you can go further, find a new, better way of making a statement.”

Jason Pierce is puzzled at the idea of being interviewed by Prog. He doesn’t really feel that his band Spiritualized are a rock band.

“I’m obsessed with rock’n’roll,” he explains over a cup of tea in a pub near his home in London’s Spitalfields, “but I don’t really like rock music.”

Well, maybe he’s a little too close to it to judge. Because whether it’s by default or by design, Spiritualized have built a body of work that takes blues, R&B and rock’n’roll tropes, and mutates them, via a kosmische post-krautrock, quasi-prog long-form approach to writing and performance, into hypnotic, captivating musical experiences. The climactic piece of Spiritualized’s best-loved album, 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, is 17 minutes long. He’s long had a penchant for orchestration and symphonic accompaniment to his music, not to mention gospel choirs. Prog is bound to note how he sits down on stage like Robert Fripp, hunched over his guitar, lost in his performance bubble. And as he’ll explain, while he’s no multiinstrumentalist maestro, he’s an obsessive perfectionist, forever in search of microscopic refinements to his artistic vision.