After a ten year hiatus, Thirteen Senses return with a new album that, appropriately opens with a ten minute track.

‘The Bound and the Infinite’ is a collection of songs made by a band unencumbered by any of the pressures so prevalent in modern music and unashamedly made for the joy of creation with no focus on potential sales, impact, or fitting into a prevailing trend.

That freedom has been hard won. Some two decades ago on their emergence from Cornwall, Thirteen Senses were the subject of almost every cliché of a ‘hot’ band. Labels consulting road atlases to find their way to Land’s End, towering offers, effusive media coverage and unbearable, unreasonable, unrealistic expectations of a group of young men still finding their feet.

To a degree, that promise was fulfilled, early singles and debut album ‘The Invitation’ (2005) delivered in spades with ‘Into The Fire’ standing at a massive forty seven and a half million streams on Spotify alone. For a time Thirteen Senses were everywhere, their music reaching a global audience through spots on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and ‘Pretty Little Liars’ but a familiar tone set in and, following second album ‘Contact’ (2007), the band pulled away from the pressure cooker, delivering two further albums in Crystal Sounds (2011) and A Strange Encounter (2014) away from the major label system that saw them focus less on commercial returns and more on their art.

And that felt like the end of the story.

Until New Year’s Eve 2020 when singer Will South called guitarist Tom Welham after three years of being out of touch to suggest possibly doing it all again. Drummer Brendon James and bassist Adam Wilson felt the same and so Thirteen Senses were reborn to ride again. Songs that had been written in 2017 were sat waiting, the time has passed but the desire remained among the childhood friends. By the first day of 2021 Thirteen Senses were back in a studio seven years since their last recordings and starting the process that would become ‘The Bound and the Infinite’.

Sessions were necessarily sporadic given the life commitments of all members. For some time, the recording was a private affair, no one outside the band knew there would be a new album, least of all the dedicated fans who had lost hope of hearing from them ever again. Recording was split between Will’s place and Tom’s with the band sharing ideas and opinions via Discord and limited time windows meaning that Tom was only available between 930pm and midnight for periods. Yet the bond that had begun as teenagers working on those first few tunes that would propel them into the public spotlight so suddenly underpinned a necessarily slow progress towards a fully realised, finished, fifth Thirteen Senses album.

The result is astounding. An ambitious, expansive, unashamedly beautiful collection of melody and poise that captures both the freedom of creation engendered by the lack of pressure and the cumulative songwriting abilities of four musicians with years of hard-won experience of how to create. It is, appropriately, an album out of time with prevailing trends that captures the widescreen soundscapes that have always been at the heart of the band’s music but adds a maturity and willingness to experiment with embellishments that capture the listener, from the flashes of Kurt Weil in ‘Sublunar’ and ‘The Wild’ to the Santana flourishes of ‘Ivy’ through to ‘Life and Deathless’, the Vangelis inspired epic that opens the album.

‘The Bound and the Infinite’ is unexpected, the sound of four friends for life rediscovering their joy in creating and playing together, an album that stands on its own merits, created if not in secrecy, then certainly in seclusion and containing a pure expression of its makers’ desires.

True to form, the album is released via the band’s own B-Sirius label. No live dates are planned at this point.