To listen to early Saint Etienne records is to be taken over by the promise of youth: the sound of three wide-eyed arrivals to the big city making the most of their pop dreams. The joy of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs’ production stems from its refusal of simple escapism, charting a clever, side-winding path where slice-of-life charm runs parallel to outré pop fantasy. Obsolete or half-imagined zones like Finisterre, Tiger Bay, and Foxbase Alpha mapped onto the real-life texture of the Home Counties, West Country, and London itself. Sarah Cracknell leverages the easy intimacy of her voice to navigate the highs and lows of this sometimes-vivid, sometimes-cardboard scenery, her glamorous, comforting presence leading the way through Wiggs and Stanley’s fireworks.
But time has a pitiless way of telescoping out, and you could almost cry at the band’s era-specific optimism and the lost world that inspired it: London still welcoming and affordable, the UK still a part of Europe, ecstasy and Concorde flights and Englishness as sources of breezy pride rather than vein-bursting reaction. “When you’re 20 or 21,” Cracknell intones with an unmistakable grain in her voice on the opening track of the group’s 11th studio album, The Night, “You have so much energy and belief.” One might read the song’s title, “Settle In,” two ways: as a rainy evening at home, or as waiting out the rest of your life. On The Night, Saint Etienne temper their boundless imagination with a sense of finality and adult knowingness, keeping the fire glowing with a full awareness of the fast-approaching cold and dark.
The Night feels like an extension and refinement of the downbeat melancholy of 2021’s I’ve Been Trying to Tell You. That record, which wove sleepy dub production and elliptical samples into mournful circles, dwelled on repetition without ever fully articulating the obvious sadness at its center. In contrast, The Night’s pivot toward ambient music dovetails with a deep world-weariness. Stanley and Wiggs evoke nocturnal scenes with an ear for creepy resonance, foregrounding the creaks, aches, and eerie frequencies that go unheard during the day. Their palette is both detailed and impressionist, conjuring a dense fog and studding it with place-markers that flicker and recede along with the music. On “Through the Glass” and “Northern Counties East,” the group soundtrack a patter of never-ending rainfall, rounding out the gloom with found percussion, pained harpsichord, and subdued guitar. At times the murk is so dense, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d put on The Caretaker or a latter-day Burial record.
The ghost that haunts much of the album is the past, how immediate and inaccessible memory can be. Single “Half Light” is a loaded fragment of a song in which Cracknell catches glimpses of another woman through the trees at dusk. With its smeared synths and detuned guitar, the track sounds like an otherworldly version of the group’s early masterpiece “Marble Lions,” as though the elusive figure in the forest could be a younger version of Cracknell herself. “Marble Lions” was a breakup song that resolved to keep an open heart despite impossible odds and distance; on “Nightingale,” Cracknell accepts the limits her past self denied. “Love is knowing/When to stop the fight,” she sings in desolate a capella, as reverb leaves her words to hang like frost in the cold air.
Occasionally her words linger a bit too long. For a good part of the record, Cracknell doesn’t sing so much as narrate over the music, offering a guided tour through Stanley and Wiggs’ disintegrating landscapes. At best (like on “Wonderlight”) these dispatches are reminiscent of Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch or Derek Jarman’s Blue, complimenting the music’s abstraction with cryptic poetry; at worst (like on “Ellar Carr”) she’s left gesturing at empty space like the David Attenborough of middle-aged ennui. History demonstrates how beautiful Cracknell’s off-kilter lyricism can be, but several tracks on The Night are missing the instrumental uplift needed to make them soar. On “When You Were Young” Cracknell ruminates on friendship, loss, and forgiveness, but Stanley and Wiggs’ inert production can’t match her lyrics’ emotional panorama. The song’s climatic, heartfelt declaration—“I’ll always love you”—stumbles where it should swoon.
Loss is inevitable but it won’t stop Saint Etienne from encouraging others to try their luck. “I could have put my foot down/And stood in your way,” Cracknell sings on “Preflyte,” “But I let you fly, let you fly away.” The song appears to be a rare empty-nest anthem, a generous call to adventure despite her own sense of loss. For decades, the band has emphasized how music isn’t simple consolation but a life-sustaining force in its own right. On “Wonderlight,” Cracknell narrates the experience of taking the long way home after an evening out, traveling in the moment rather than feeling tormented by the past or dismayed by the future. It’s a presence of mind that’s rare on this record, a small revelation only made possible by hanging out with friends. The Night is frequently cold and lonely, but Saint Etienne make for invaluable company.
