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When you’ve spent most of your life on the move, hopping from one country to another, tour to tour, city to city, bar to bed, bed to bus, what happens when you finally stop? It’s a theme that weaves its way through Sinking Ships, the excellent seventh record by Alberta Cross. The band, based around lead singer and guitarist Petter Ericson Stakee, explored the idea of years spent in transit on 2020’s What Are We Frightened Of? (key giveaway: the first song was titled Find A Home Out There). That record was a creative reset that saw Stakee enter into a fruitful songwriting partnership with producer Luke Potashnick and here they pick up the thread. “A lot of the songs are about what comes after settling down,” says Stakee, who now lives in Frome, Somerset with his family. “It’s about life catching up with you, a lot of things catching up with you and how that does a lot to your head.”
In many ways, everything that is wonderful about Sinking Ships is wrapped up in its opening song and first single Mercy. It’s all there: the expansive, panoramic rock atmospherics, the melancholic majesty, epic and simplistic at once, bombastic but never overblown, an indelible hook giving the song its uplifting swell. “Mercy deals with mental health and that feeling when you stop, getting back on your feet,” says Stakee. Sinking Ships is made up of songs that look back in an attempt to try and plot a way forward.
With that in mind, then, how about a recap to remind you how Alberta Cross got here? The group were formed by Swedish native Stakee and his London pal Terry Wolfers way back in the folk-rock land grab of the mid-00s, when waistcoats were in fashion and the banjo industry was booming. There was something different about this duo, though, their anthemic Americana-tinged songs possessing a vulnerability and earthiness, and it soon showed in how hugely their debut record The Thief & The Heartbreaker began to connect. “It felt so great writing those songs,” recalls Stakee. “Wherever I play in the world, I still have to play them. It felt so pure, it was one of the most exciting times I’ve had as a songwriter.” What followed was success on both sides of the Atlantic and the relentless grind of US touring that comes with it. They embarked on high-profile jaunts with Mumford & Sons, Portugal. The Man, Neil Young, Them Crooked Vultures (Dave
Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones) and Rag N’ Bone Man and performed on distinguished TV shows around the globe, appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman, Last Call with Carson Daly and more, whilst their tracks were featured on hit TV shows such as Million Little Pieces, Sons Of Anarchy and Californication.
