Gavin Friday has announced details of his highly anticipated new solo album, Ecce Homo. The album is set for release on 25 October via BMG. It is trailered by Friday’s first single in over a decade with the release of the title track ‘Ecce Homo’.

The new album – which was produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball and Michael Heffernan – marks his first since 2011’s Catholic and is announced alongside an eponymous digital EP featuring the title track, as well as two remixes and an instrumental version of the track. The track is also released as a single.

THE MAN FRIDAY

An artist who needs little in the way of an introduction, Friday is perhaps best known as the founding frontman of cult Irish post-punk outfit Virgin Prunes. He has enjoyed a varied career as a genre-hopping, award-winning songwriter, composer, actor, visual artist, and creative director. Over four decades he has collaborated with numerous ground-breaking artists, including his childhood friends in U2 – a constant adviser and collaborator over the years, he was creative director on their Sphere show in Las Vegas – as well as Colin Newman, Laurie Anderson, Sinead O’Connor, Scott Walker, The Fall, Quincy Jones, and many more.

Friday has scored music for Academy Award nominated films Jim Sheridan's In The Name of The Father and In America (earning Ivor Novello and Golden Globe nominations for his work on the latter), and his artistic contributions extend to visual arts, with several exhibitions showcasing his work, as well as collaborating and performing on-stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The last year also saw the release of the animated film Peter And The Wolf, which featured scoring and narration by Friday; and also the reissuing of classic Virgin Prunes albums and EPs on vinyl.

Ecce Homo, the album, is described as "an ecstatic and unbound expression of anger and independence, of severing oneself from stereotypes of what you’re supposed to be while also acknowledging that our hardest battles are often our collective ones. There are love songs and fight songs, reflections on loss and reveries of nostalgia, anthems for solidarity and excoriations of the powerful."

Gavin Friday thinks it’s the most honest album he’s ever made.

Having teased details of the title track in the months leading up to the release with mysterious posts written in Ogham – an ancient runic language that was used in Ireland and parts of the UK between the 5th and 9th centuries – the first taste of the album comes in the form of it’s title track 'Ecce Homo’.

“The track ‘Ecce Homo’ is my own personal kick in the head and kiss on the cheek to a world gone very wrong,” Gavin Friday offers.

The track is accompanied by a brand-new video, produced entirely in AI by studio284 / Petros Tryfon:

THE STORY BEHIND THE ALBUM

Ecce Homo began more than a decade ago with a surprise email to Gavin Friday, from Dave Ball, the Soft Cell co-founder who produced Virgin Prunes 40 years ago. They hadn’t seen each other during that long span, but Ball asked if Friday wanted to conspire on a cover of Suicide’s 'Ghost Rider' for Alan Vega’s 70th birthday. For several years, they bounced ideas for other songs back and forth via email until Friday finally visited Bell in London for a series of studio sessions.

They wrote the bulk of the music on Ecce Homo together, their interpersonal dynamic resulting in tracks that moved freely between disparate emotional ends.

Friday, though, wanted to make it all bigger: "To drape the songs in the finery and grandeur he’d indulged with his soundtrack work." He did that back in Dublin – with a cast of familiar collaborators including producer Michael Heffernan – while he also cared for his ailing mother, then suffering the final stages of Alzheimer’s.

Enraged by the rise of international strongmen but inspired by a long, loving, and stable relationship with another man after a prolonged divorce, Friday built Ecce Homo as a monument of, and to, his own emotions.

In early 2020, he was ready to mix the album when Covid-19 arrived. He put it down for two years, vowing to revisit it only when he could make a little more sense of the world. His mother died, as did Hal Willner, one of his closest collaborators, and one of his two beloved dogs, Ralf.

Gavin Friday. Credit: Barry McCall

"That difficult gap,” we are told, "seemed to supercharge Ecce Homo, enhancing not only its sense of deserved indignation but also amplifying the tenderness and love that undergird so many of these songs. Hurt comes from every side here, in every possible shape, but the real core of the album is a reaction rooted in hope, in seeing the struggles of the past and the possibilities of the future through the same unified gaze. It is a stirring testament to finding comfort and strength wherever we can, to enduring in whatever way we must."

When Gavin Friday was a teenager, alienated from the Catholic church and looking for meaning, music became what has been described as his godsend, his lifeline, his revelation. Or, as he calls it, “the release where I could bleed publicly.” He surmises it saved his life.

Though it is rooted in loss, Ecce Homo advances that story of survival: of how we are always looking for what can ferry us into the next phase of our life.

"It is neither a happy album nor a tragic one,” it is revealed. “It is, instead, a bracingly honest thing, staring at both sides of a life and testifying to how it has been and how it may yet be."

Ecce Homo, the album, will be released on 25 October via BMG on ltd. edition transparent blue vinyl, as well as a deluxe CD package featuring an exclusive 28-page booklet and bonus material. The album will be available everywhere digitally, including two exclusive remixes.

Pre-order / save HERE