12million record sales, five number 1 singles, two multi-platinum albums and a couple Brit awards. The stats speak for their own reasons. Now All Saints launch their brand single ‘One Strike‘, released 26th February.
‘One Strike‘ is often a canny, charming reminder of the stuff huge swathes from the global pop audience loved about All Saints initially. The track is usually a perceptible call to arms for anybody who experiences one particular moment, the phone call or conversation, that changes your health completely. The song is determined against a lovelorn yet uplifting melody as well as the most heart-breaking middle eight apt to be sung by any harmonious assembly in 2010.
Shaznay explains: “When I write, I just think of what’s on my own mind. The lyrics originated from somewhere very real. Nic was under-going a lot of things during that time. That was the main thing on my mind since it was the heaviest thing occurring.” The song was written to be a direct a reaction to the younger Appleton sister’s marriage dissolving. “We spoke all day and hours on the phone,” Nic says. “The first couple of times I heard it inside my car,” says Nat, “I couldn’t stop crying because I could hear so clearly just what it was about.”
The single are going to be followed by their first album inside a decade, ‘Red Flag’, released April 8th. After the touring the UK in 2014, All Saints resolved to behave they never imagined they would again, and wrote, recorded and produced a brand new record. It was not made without massive prior consideration. “We didn’t force ourselves into it,” says Natalie, “and it couldn’t have happened with a better quantity of all of our lives. I just missed being using the girls. It makes us happy. Listen, whenever you can work with your favourite people, then why don’t you? I have this sort of good some time to I spend more time laughing and getting fun than I do working.” “The album,” says Shaznay, “could happen to be made a lot quicker if we’d spent a shorter time joking around while which makes it.”
It sounds great to obtain them back, reminding you of something you’d perhaps forgotten you missed quite so much. What is so special regarding the new record is just how contemporary it sounds without ever losing the core essence of All Saints, forever enclosed in the magical conflagration of the four voices. This is what they actually do.
“Seriously,” says Shaznay, “I got on this kind of roll writing and recording together with the Girls again, we’ve started getting material for an additional album together already. This couldn’t feel much more right.”
As they turned off their teens for their twenties, All Saints were the symbolic British girl-band gateway on the new millennium. They were an irrepressible, immediately identifiable gang that might mascot us through for the 21st century. With music touched by the panoply of sharply honed influences, from The Shirelles through 90s reggae, disco, slouchy club electronica and touched all over with all the proximity the ladies grew up to Notting Hill Carnival, these people were the flip-side with the tween-pop sound with their peers.
Now 19 years after their debut instruction, against several striking odds, All Saints understand specifically where it’s at again.