Snow Patrol's profound new single The Beginning suggests that new album will be worth waiting for

Just when it felt like Snow Patrol were allowing themselves to drift into semi-retirement, settling into their comfortable middle age in the Hollywood Hills or the Holywood hills boom they're back with a new single, a new album and a new arena tour of the UK and Ireland.

The Co Down superstars haven't released anything in six years, drummer Johnny Quinn and bassist Paul Wilson announced they were quitting last year and they seemed to be pretty busy working on side-projects, songwriting collaborations and campaigning for music venues.

So I didn't really believe frontman Gary Lightbody when he insisted the group would continue with just himself, Nate Connolly and Johnny McDaid and there'd be a new album. I suspected the material would come out in guises, more side projects, solo efforts or even a whole new band.

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I'm always glad to be proven wrong (handily) especially when the proof is of such quality.

The Beginning, as the new single is called, feels as fresh as when the Scots rockers (well, they were formed in Dundee) first broke through to the mainstream with their poppier new sound back in 2003.

Like so many of Snow Patrol's great songs, it is able to harness that alchemy of being at once maudlin and uplifting.

"Love, if you're near, don't tell it like it is 'cos I don't know how to hear or to learn," Gary sings softly over sparse electronica. "Because I want to be in love without being loved in return."

It's a twist on the old Nature Boy lyric made famous by Nat King Cole (and later David Bowie for Moulin Rouge): "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved in return."

In fact Gary turns the sentiment entirely on its head and it is clever and moving and you can feel the ache of unrequited love. Later as the song breaks uptempo, and again in true Snow Patrol fashion, it becomes "only you and me in this life and I don't want to f*** it up now".

The group told how The Beginning is "cornerstone of the band's eighth studio album" written on a trip to Somerset. Gary explained: "The first day we wrote The Beginning, start to finish."

"And he did the vocal in one take," added Johnny. "Straight after writing the lyrics. So it has this mind-collapsing quality to it where you feel like you're seeing into someone's soul."

And the album, The Forest Is The Path to be released in September, follows the same line of introspection and self-interrogation.

Gary explained: "One of its key building blocks was the idea of love from the distance of time. I haven't been in a relationship for a very long time, 10 years or more, so love from a distance to me meant the way a relationship sits in your memory from a distance of, say, 10 years.

"That's not something I'd previously thought about as away to write about love. So it's like, when you're in love, you're standing in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When you've broken up with that person, you're out in the street. You can still see the building, but you're not in there anymore. And when it's 10 years later, now you're standing in Brooklyn looking at the Manhattan skyline.

"That's kind of a summing up of this album. It's a way of looking at various mistakes, any pain I may have caused, from a place where nothing is hurting anymore, except the memory when you pull it back into your mind. The memory itself is full of hurt but everything around it isn't. You're holding in your hand this ball of fire, but now you've got gloves on."

As ever, it's profound and unashamedly from the heart. It's what makes Snow Patrol stand out in a crowded field of stadium rockers, their songs are visceral and cerebral, a double whammy that hits you in the guts and square on the kisser.

The Beginning is out now. The Forest Is The Path is released on September 13 and Snow Patrol play Belfast's SSE Arena on February 27 with tickets on sale at ticketmaster.ie from 10am next Friday... (And if you pre-order the album by 5pm on Tuesday you can get tour presale access).

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