Blossoms’ long-term producer James Skelly has always encouraged the band to try working with someone else and, on their fifth album, the Stockport quintet finally took him up on the suggestion. With Skelly, himself no stranger to adventurous explorations as leader of The Coral, still involved in an overarching production role, Gary sees Blossoms triumphantly expand their gang. “This time round we were more open-minded and wanted to try to collaborate with other people,” singer/guitarist Tom Ogden tells Apple Music. The first port of call was reaching out to soul-dance duo Jungle. “I’d realised they produced themselves and loved the way their records sounded,” says Ogden. “We booked some time on New Year’s Day 2023 to start recording and did ‘Nightclub’ and ‘What Can I Say After I’m Sorry?’. They were great but, in hindsight, we didn’t have enough songs to go and start recording the album.” The tone had been set, though, for a celebratory record with a swagger about it. After the filmic introspection of 2022’s Ribbon Around the Bomb, Gary is Blossoms back at their ebullient, anthemic best. “We always knew we wanted it to be great live and a bit of a party,” says Ogden. “That was the only blueprint.” The recording process was characterised by a series of breakthrough moments. The first was working with Jungle. The second was the emergence of the title track, bringing the live alchemy of the band back to the fore (and almost certainly the only song you will hear this year about the theft of a fibreglass gorilla called Gary). The third essential ingredient was a songwriting collaboration with Irish country-pop star CMAT. “Working with CMAT gave me the final push to be a writer and be inspired, and that seamed the album together,” says Ogden. Let the singer and bandmates Josh Dewhurst (guitar), Joe Donovan (drums) and Charlie Salt (bass) guide you through Gary, track by track. “Big Star” Tom Ogden: “I wrote this after being in the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles. This guy walked in [the lobby] and was having a meeting about this magazine. I Googled him while I was sat there, and it turns out he’s this big writer in America who’s got this music magazine and has done since the early ’90s. And I was like, ‘Should I go over to him and be like, “I’m in a band”?’ But then I bottled it. I like the playfulness of the lyrics. I think that was after working with CMAT, it influenced me to be like, ‘You can write something that’s really direct.’ I was literally sat there thinking it and then I just turned it into a song. Not going over to him is kind of very us and very me.” “What Can I Say After I’m Sorry?” TO: “This was the song that made me think, ‘Oh, we could work with Jungle.’ The sonic was influenced by Jungle really. I wrote it on the piano, it was a bit more R&B when I wrote it, maybe like Outkast or something. The title was from an old Nat King Cole record but what the song is about is when I’m in a bit of a rut and my emotions are bleeding into my relationship. I imagine it’s probably quite challenging to be with someone who’s in a rut. There’s not that much that the other person can do to snap you out of it. It’s me saying, ‘What can I say after I’m sorry?’, in terms of, ‘I wish I wasn’t like this sometimes.’” “Gary” TO: “I was driving home and the news came on: ‘A giant fibreglass gorilla has been stolen from a garden centre in Carluke, Scotland. The hunt is on for Gary the Gorilla.’ I went home and started reading about it and then wrote the song in half an hour on the acoustic guitar. It was as if the song always existed, I just had to wait for that moment of inspiration to come over me.” Charlie Salt: “Tom does this really clever thing where he’ll take something quite daft and it’ll be juxtaposed with this lovely arrangement and melody underneath. It immediately [sounded] like a classic Blossoms tune and it’s got this strange emotion…and you’re always thinking about the gorilla itself.” Josh Dewhurst: “We bought our own Gary and he lives at the studio. Every day, when you get to work, you see him and you’re like, ‘How are you doing, Gary? You all right?’” “I Like Your Look” TO: “This was written with CMAT in Anglesey, Wales. The plan was for me and the lads to go away just for some time on our own. CMAT was going to come and write with me in Stockport but the dates didn’t work, so she was like, ‘I’ll just come to Wales with you.’ One night, we’d been trying something else and it wasn’t really working so Ciara [Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT] was like, ‘Right, everyone get a book and start shouting things out from the book that you think could be song titles.’ Joe went, ‘I like your look,’ and I was like, ‘That’s good, it should be a song about fashion, it should be a bit like “Pop Muzik” by M.’ Ciara was like, ‘Yeah, you should do ’80s rapping like “Time Rag” by Joan Baez or Blondie’s “Rapture”.’ It was a really fast burst of creativity. We’d never written like that before, it was really fun and inspiring. Everyone brought something to the table. I think you can hear that on the record.” “Nightclub” TO: “This was written after reading a blog about a guy who was in love with his friend’s girlfriend. I had the title and I started reading about people trying to blag their way into nightclubs. It was inspired by my own personal experience of going to nightclubs growing up and also reading online about other people’s experiences. Working with Jungle definitely brought the best out of this song. Josh Lloyd-Watson put his thing on it. He was like, ‘Imagine you’re female backing singers in the ’60s,’ and we’d be doing all this stuff. He’d chop it up and flip the song on its head.” “Perfect Me” TO: “Again, this was written as us five in the room very, very fast. I came into the rehearsal room one morning and Josh was messing around on a Moog sequencer. He pressed a button, and it had a bit of that Who, ‘Baba O’Riley’ thing about it. Immediately, I was like, ‘I can hear these chords underneath this.’” CS: “It might have been the first one we recorded for the album and we were sat on it for so long. It became a little bit stale. James Skelly always stood by it and considered it a single.” TO: “Yeah, it had the energy but we shunned it a little bit. We came back with fresh ears six months later and we were like, ‘Hang on a minute, this is really good.’” “Mothers” TO: “I wanted to have our version of ‘Bros’ by Wolf Alice, a song about friendship. Me and Joe have been best mates since we were 12. Our mothers were actually friends in the ’80s, and I had a line about that in another song, so when I started writing this verse idea about me and Joe growing up, I was like, ‘Oh, what about the lyrics that I wrote about our mothers in the ’80s?’ I probably refined it over a month and a half and went back and tweaked this lyric, changed the verse melody, pulled the words from a different song I’d written.” Josh Dewhurst: “When we recorded it, we kept on the family theme. My dad’s a pianist. Oftentimes, when we’re in the studio properly recording, he’ll just come down for the craic because he’s a genius and also he’s funny as hell.” TO: “Josh’s dad suggested these insane chords that we would’ve never come across ourselves. It was a nice, full-circle thing, a song about me and Joe references our mothers, and then Josh’s dad played on it. It’s very wholesome.” “Cinnamon” TO: “This was written out of a jam in the room. This is the most collaborative record we’ve done in terms of writing, we were just jamming in there. It started off with me, Josh and Chaz and I was hearing it [as] more Vampire Weekend but, when we came back and worked on it the next day, Joe made it more us, helped it become more of an anthem.” Joe Donovan: “I imagined it in a field at a festival, that big, euphoric vibe.” “Slow Down” TO: “‘Slow Down’ is only one of three personal songs about my relationship on this album. It usually makes up the bulk of records whereas, this time, I’ve made an effort to write about other stuff. This is saying, in a relationship, we needed to take a moment and slow down and appreciate each other a bit more. We took our eye off the ball in terms of looking after each other a little bit.” “Why Do I Give You the Worst of Me?” TO: “Often, I can put too much weight on stuff with the band being my source of happiness. I don’t think it’s necessarily a healthy way to live your life. It’s that thing where your partner always sees the worst of you, warts and all. I was speaking to Ciara about it because we were writing songs and trying to be very open. I was just explaining what was going on and I think my wife Katie had said, ‘Oh, why do I always get the worst of you?’ because it was like I’d gone away and come to life writing. At home, I’d been struggling writing, basically. She wanted that from me at home as well, and then Ciara just started writing it from things I was saying. It’s quite a personal song. It was quite intense.”