After Blossoms played a triumphant set at Mexico City’s annual Corona Capital festival in 2019, frontman Tom Ogden decided to stick around for a few days with his partner and see the sights. One such expedition was a trip to the Frida Kahlo Museum in the Coyoacán neighbourhood of the city. “One of the paintings was referred to as a ribbon around a bomb,” Ogden tells Apple Music. “I thought, ‘That’s going to be the album title.’ It was a very evocative phrase.” It’s a perfect description of the push-and-pull at the heart of Ribbon Around the Bomb, where the euphoric anthems that the group have become renowned for since emerging from Stockport, Greater Manchester, midway through the 2010s are met with a more singer-songwriter/acoustic sway. Ogden says it was the band’s long-term producer, The Coral frontman James Skelly, who encouraged him to instigate a creative reset. “He was like, ‘You’ve got to do something different on this record—it can’t just be Blossoms by numbers.’” It resulted in their most fully formed album to date, a record of sonic gear-changes where nothing is rushed, and the melodies are allowed to breathe. Let Ogden and drummer Joe Donovan take you through it, track by track. “The Writer’s Theme” Tom Ogden: “James kept saying, ‘This album has got to be a bit more cinematic.’ It’s not a concept album, but it’s thematic in a way.” Joe Donovan: “This is the first album where we’ve consciously thought about it as a whole, rather than song by song.” TO: “It’s a bit like a film, where you’ve got characters and that kind of thing. We thought, ‘We can have a string piece to bring the album in.’ We were going to call it ‘Prelude’ or something, but we thought that’s the obvious choice. We already had this song, ‘The Writer’. So, then I thought, ‘Well, in a film, you’d have the character’s theme, wouldn’t you? It should be called ‘The Writer’s Theme’.” JD: “We’re basically just doing this to get a Bond theme.” “Ode to NYC” TO: “We got asked by Netflix to write a song for a montage sequence for New York, for a rom-com. I quite like a challenge, in that sense. And I love New York, because me and my wife used to go every January. We know all the quirky places, and we’d explore—everything you hear in the song, basically. Netflix didn’t use it in the end. I think it was too specific for the scene they’d already shot, because I’m naming all these places, but we all loved it. It’s one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written.” “Ribbon Around the Bomb” TO: “On this one, I was listening to a lot of Arcade Fire, and just fucking about on the piano, and a lot of things I was reading at the time filtered into it. It’s quite pessimistic. ‘She said life gets no better and no worse.’ I read that in a book, and I thought it was a great line. It does reflect what I’m like as a person. I’m a bit pessimistic. I’m getting better. The ‘Ribbon Around the Bomb’, to me, is dressing something up which has something underlying that could go off at any time. It’s a bit dangerous.” “The Sulking Poet” JD: “There was a Blossoms fan page called Ode to Ogden and the bio was ‘Celebrate the beauty of the sulking poet.’ I thought it was fucking hilarious, calling Tom a sulking poet.” TO: And obviously, they said ‘sulking’ because in photographs I’ve got a tendency to have a face like a slapped arse. It’s just the way my face is. It quickly became about someone who’s trying to make it as a songwriter or as an artist, but they don’t think they’ll ever make it, and they can’t really be arsed, or they never lived up to what they thought they would be. It’s quite tongue in cheek in places. Sonically, it’s inspired a bit by Dire Straits and George Michael and Simon & Garfunkel.” “Born Wild” TO: “It started off with the riff, and then I built it around that. Again, I already had that song title, but the words just fell out, because that’s how I was feeling at the time. ‘I feel so wrong, but boys must be strong.’ I have a tendency to bottle things up, as I know a lot of guys do. I just fully embraced it on this song and didn’t really hold anything back.“ “The Writer” TO: “This is my favourite tune on the album. By this point, me and James Skelly were piecing the album together over text and saying, ‘What about this? What about that?’ and talking about characters and stuff. I already had ‘The Sulking Poet’, I already had ‘Visions’ and ‘Ode to NYC’, but you couldn’t tie them together. I think ‘The Writer’ was the last one I wrote for the album, which tied it all together. The song’s about writer’s block and worrying about writing, but then defeats the object of it because it’s a song about it. It’s technically about myself, because I write the songs, but then we were talking about this bigger picture of this other character in the other songs. It’s all basically me, but this one’s quite specifically me.” “Everything About You” TO: “It was quite early on in the writing process. It’s a love song about being with someone and saying, ‘Is this what life’s for?’ I always found it harder to write positive love songs, rather than about a break-up, but I’ve not gone through a break-up for seven years now. The love songs seem to come up more now because I’m happy with someone. I feel like I’ve found a way to get it into songs without it being cringey.” “Care For” TO: “This was written maybe two weeks after I wrote ‘The Keeper’ on the last album, which is why it sounds a bit like it. If you strip it down to the piano, the piano groove is in the same world. We always had a soft spot for it because it had that kind of Bee Gees, ABBA, ’70s thing going on, and it was probably the furthest we’ve delved down that direction. We were trying to channel that kind of wedding disco tune.” “Cinerama Holy Days” TO: “This one started off with the piano groove, and the song title was out of a book. Cinerama’s an American phrase—we don’t have them [venues for showing films made with the Cinerama wide-screen process] over here. But I suppose I interpret it as just the summertime when you’re young and it’s kind of a carefree time. We had ‘Under My Thumb’ by the Stones as a reference point for how we wanted it to sound.” JD: “I remember it being a conscious effort to try and make it just a bit more dance-y. It’s got a bit more attitude, this tune.” “Edith Machinist” TO: “In New York, me and [my wife] Katie used to go to this shop on the Lower East Side called Edith Machinist. And I just thought, again, ‘What a great name.’ I’d had it in my notes for four or five years, and I’d never managed to get it into a song. This song was a bit more Smiths-y on the demo, but I got to that point in the chorus, and I needed a female name for what I wanted to say. I thought, ‘Edith!’ and it fitted. We had to de-Smiths it a little bit. I went away for the weekend, and they went in to finish the end of that song and it came out like The Coral.” JD: “That bit at the end is literally just The Coral, isn’t it? Tom wasn’t there to rein us in. We were like, ‘Yeah, let’s fucking do it!’” “Visions” JD: “We always like a long tune at the end of an album. We’ve always done that. But we’ve never gone this long.” TO: “James Skelly sent me a War on Drugs song called ‘Thinking of a Place’, which is about 12 minutes long. He said, ‘You need to write a song like this. It’s about reflecting on where you’ve got to, the past, all that stuff.’ So, I just went and wrote this. That lyric, ‘Was I complete at 23?’ felt quite poignant for the record, and important. It’s about my own experience and reflection.” “The Last Chapter” TO: This is the same as ‘The Writer’s Theme’, but that’s on strings and this is just played on a piano. It’s just like the end credits.”