The Coral have shared their latest song ‘Oceans Apart’ featuring Cillian Murphy from their forthcoming album ‘Sea of Mirrors’.
‘Oceans Apart’ serves as the forthcoming album’s closing track. The Peaky Blinders star provides a vocal cameo towards the end of the song. Murphy’s collaboration with the band stemmed from the LP’s co-producer Sean O’Hagan.
The band have described the track as “The ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Queen would’ve written if, instead of touring the world, they stayed in watching cinecittà studios films and listening to Gene Clark’
Speaking to NME about the unlikely team-up, The Coral frontman James Skelly recalled: “Sean was like, ‘Oh I know someone. I did his first film. He might be good – Cillian Murphy’ and I was like ‘What? One of the best actors in the world?’ And then Cillian Murphy just emailed and was like, ‘Ah, yeah I love the band, I’m up for helping you out.’”
“Then we just had a conversation about what it was going to be, because we needed help with it. We were speaking about books we liked and films and how you build a character. He went away and thought about the character and tried different things.”
He continued: “He just sent what he did for the album and said it should be like an old sort of American actor like Bella Lugosi or Buster Keaton. The idea was these massive stars ended up in these B-movies. And they were like, ‘Where is my life?’ That’s the idea, this internal thing of, ‘How did I get here?’ He just nailed it and we put it in the track and put some reverb on it. We were like ‘Nice one Cillian, thanks a lot, you put the cherry on top.’”
‘Sea Of Mirrors’ sees The Coral explore new territory by crafting their own “surreal” gun-slinging soundtrack. On top of this LP, the band will also be releasing another album along with it titled ‘Holy Joe’s Coral Island Medicine Show’.
The second LP is a spin-off project connected to their 2021 album ‘Coral Island’. It has been described as the “ultimate Coral B-sides album” featuring a “DJ [voiced by Skelly’s grandad aka ‘The Great Muriarty’] playing country death ballads”.
Both LP’s are set for release on September 8. You can pre-order the albums here.
In a four-star review of the band’s last LP ‘Coral Island’, NME shared: “Sprinkled with the sound of distant seagulls and Hawaiian guitars for good measure, along with vivid storytelling, it’s a bold move for The Coral to come out with something so intricate at this stage of their career, even taking the time to pen an accompanying book. But immerse yourself in this heavily themed epic and you’ll be rewarded with a nostalgic trip that showcases some of their most adventurous writing to date.”