Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol have never really taken the easy route. Now comprising the trio of Gary Lightbody, Johnny McDaid and Nathan Connolly, the band have emerged from the process of writing and recording their extraordinary new album, The Forest is the Path, perhaps a little battered, but maybe, just maybe, a little wiser and certainly more humble from the experience.

Fans of the band will all have favourite albums that they return to again and again. What could possibly hold a candle to Final Straw, to Eyes Open? To A Hundred Million Suns, Fallen Empires? To Wildness? Yes, a trillion times, to all of those. But wait, wait, until you listen to The Forest is the Path. This is an album of contrasts and maybe even contradictions. At times epically joyous, life-affirming and giant.

“We’ve made so many records where I have sat and stared at the computer screen and the flashing cursor, for hours and hours and hours. But on this album, the inertia that I was bound to for so many years was finally shaken off. It felt like action and activity, and the infusion of something beyond understanding.”

The Forest is the Path’s masterstroke is to set Gary’s self-investigation and expiation to music of incandescent beauty, its textures, lulls and crescendos, use of space and contrast burrowing their way into your heart. Snow Patrol have, 30 years into their career, minted a masterpiece. They are now emerging, blinking, into the daylight, still trying to make sense of the album they’ve made, and the emotions that went into it.