Primal Scream have spent much of this century on autopilot. Every album after 2000’s XTRMNTR has respectfully rehashed frontman Bobby Gillespie’s main ingredients: acid-dipped grooves, quasi-political lyrics, melodies equally suited to 2 a.m. warehouse parties or Rolling Stones ballads. The garnishes change—2016’s Chaosmosis had Sky Ferreira and Haim, 2013’s More Light had DJ and Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes—but generally, if you’ve heard one Primal Scream album in the past 25 years, you’ve heard them all. This also applies to the Scottish band’s 12th album, Come Ahead, but at least it embraces a new flavor: Gillespie’s long-standing love of funk and soul.
The ghost of the Stax rhythm section haunts album opener “Ready to Go Home,” where a gospel choir sings of being ready for one’s time to come, punctuated by restless strings, percussive bass, and jazzy horns that add throbbing tension. This is the first new Primal Scream album since the passing of both Gillespie’s father and the band’s keyboardist Martin Duffy—an old family photo of Gillespie’s dad graces the cover—and his restrained vocal delivery sounds shaken by recent encounters with death that don’t quite feel peaceful or comforting. Gillespie excels at writing openers, and “Ready to Go Home” establishes Come Ahead as a nostalgia trip through the soul influences that, while present in Primal Scream’s DNA from the beginning, have never before felt so obvious.
Holmes returns here as producer; this reunion is more successful than the more sprawling and dense More Light, as Gillespie lets him turn Primal Scream into the slick, muscular house band for a long-lost Ocean’s movie. Come Ahead peaks with the one-two punch of “Innocent Money” and “Melancholy Man.” The cinematic former could soundtrack the stylish grit of a classic Gordon Parks film, or at least a Tarantino misremembering of Blaxploitation, while the downbeat latter comes from Gillespie’s 2023 score for Émilie Deleuze’s 5 Hectares, reworked by Holmes and Primal Scream’s longtime second-in-command, guitarist Andrew Innes.
The album loses gas in the back half, where multiple songs seem to blur together into one long, undifferentiated jam as repetition fatigue sets in. Lyrically, the songs not explicitly about Gillespie’s father retread the same leftist criticism of class and politics we’ve been hearing since 1987—valid and relevant desires for a better world sung by a successful rock star who sounds almost bored, like he’s muttering “I still have to sing about this shit?” between takes. If you’re actively seeking a new Primal Scream album in 2024, you’ve likely already heard and agreed with everything Gillespie has to say.
Still, for fans who hopped off the bus, Come Ahead is interesting enough to hop back in. It’s also good enough for newcomers who may have discovered Primal Scream via Dua Lipa’s endorsement of “Loaded,” or Gillespie’s participation in one of the past decade’s better memes. This was indeed the longest gap between Primal Scream albums—Gillespie spent the past few years writing a memoir, collaborating with other musicians, and touring behind the 30th anniversary of Screamadelica, still the record people care about most—and though Come Ahead hardly challenges the idea of what a Primal Scream album could be, enough time has passed to miss them.
