Robert Forster announces new album

Robert Forster has announced details of his ninth solo album, and the follow-up to 2003’s The Candle and the Flame.

Strawberries is set for release on May 23 via Tapete Records, and today Forster shares the eponymous lead track, which you can watch / listen to below.

The song, said to be a red herring in the context of the album; one that deals almost exclusively in observational character studies or, as Forster puts it, “story songs”.

Elaborating more on Strawberries, Forster says, “The last album was very personal. I didn’t write anything for about a year after I’d finished She’s a Fighter for the last album. And then I just started to write songs that were something a little bit else. They just came naturally. I didn’t really have a theme, it was just sort of lighter, a situation a little bit outside of myself. And I thought that was good. That was a place I could go to.”

The first song to point in this new direction is All of the Time, which begins with the line, “There’s propaganda and there’s truth / And there’s a feeling that I get when I’m with you”. “It was just this sort of language that I normally didn’t use,” says Forster. “It meant I wasn’t going into my present situation. It just pushed me out there and made it less confessional. A lot more playful and a lot more story-orientated as well.”

Joined by Swedish backing band, Peter Morén (Peter, Björn and John) on guitar and also producer of Strawberries, Jonas Thorell on bass, Magnus Olsson on drums, Lina Langendorf on various woodwind instruments and Anna Åhman on keys, Forster’s idea, per the linear notes, was “to arrive in a town with a clutch of songs, to rehearse, record and mix an album with local musicians over a number of weeks, and then leave with the record done.”

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Morén also comments on working alongside the former Go-Betweens co-founder. “It’s great working with someone who is truly an auteur,” he says, looking back on the recording sessions over a four week period in September/ October 2024. “That sense of direction that ‘This is what I do, and this is who I am as I perceive it’. He does what he does in the only way he can and changes and evolves in that sphere but never loses sight of his own personality and strengths.”

“I wanted to explode the sound of my records to an extent”, adds Forster in a somewhat different assessment of the collaboration, “I wanted to just bring in new colours.”