Album’s have all sorts of interesting and varied origin stories. From the tumultuous and difficult times that saw Fleetwood Mac crafting Rumours against all the odds, to Justin Vernon holing up in his father’s remote cabin for the winter to come to terms with a breakup and recording For Emma, Forever Ago in the process, the stories of how records come into being are often as rich and engaging as the album’s themselves. 

For Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro though, there’s a more utilitarian genesis at play with their new and ninth studio album The Myth Of The Happily Ever After. Interestingly, it’s a record that’s been produced from the offcuts, the tracks that didn’t make it, onto their 2020 release A Celebration Of Endings, which the band managed to complete before the onset of the pandemic.

Though that release was a fantastic album, the prospect of a new record assembled from the offcuts of its predecessor might not exactly fill fans with encouragement. Bizarrely though, it’s the Coronavirus pandemic that allowed The Myth Of The Happily Ever After to exist at all. Like other acts, suddenly unable to tour as a result of venues around the world being forced into closure, Biffy revisited the songs they’d written that didn’t quite make the cut for A Celebration Of Endings, and worked on them, breathing life into their once abandoned bodies.

For a band whose very essence is built around the element of surprise, of chaos and in-your-face sonic exuberance, this refined, calculated approach might seem a little bit odd. But don’t be concerned because the headline is this: The Myth Of The Happily Ever After is at once both a more linear experience that we’ve come to expect from the trio, but also a quintessentially and instantly familiar Biffy record. It has, as the band talked about in the build up to its release, the feel of being a “sister record’ to its predecessor. 

The soft, ethereal tones of opening track DumDum herald this new dawn, as guitarist and lead singer Simon Neil coos “This is how we fuck it from the start.” It’s a heck of a forewarning on a record that is itself born out of the ashes, but as the guitar punch of A Hunger In Your Heart slaps you in the face, any last inkling of concern you might have had about this album’s ‘reject’ status are swiftly banished. 

It’s an instant classic of a Biffy track, throwing in all their hallmarks: big drums, twisting, sly guitars, and a big melodic kick in the chorus all tied together by Neil’s desperate, yearning vocals. It’s a stirring affair, written in response to the anguish of lockdown, and it feels like a sort of call to arms, a demand that we all fight back against the turmoil of the last two years.

Elsewhere, there’s plenty of fun to find. Separate Missions is cut through with shimmies of off kilter electro that expand and contract, before evaporating into Neil’s gentle chorus line, and Witch’s Cup is a joyously carefree romp. Holy Water serves as the album’s interlude, a thoughtful acoustic number, before the big tempo changes and synths of Errors In The History Of God shake things up again, while Unknown Male 01 is absorbingly contemplative as Neil declares that “'m gonna try and right my wrongs / Before I up and leave.”

On the band’s official website, Neil has jumped further into the origin of The Myth Of The Happily Ever After. “This is a reaction to A Celebration Of Endings. This album is a real journey, a collision of every thought and emotion we’ve had over the past eighteen months,” he said. 

“There was a real fortitude in ‘A Celebration’ but in this record we’re embracing the vulnerabilities of being a band and being a human in this twisted era of our lives. Even the title is the polar opposite. It’s asking, do we create these narratives in our own minds to give us some security when none of us know what’s waiting for us at the end of the day?”

Curiously, while the fading notes of Cop Syrup – the final track on A Celebration Of Endings – saw Biffy cry out “Fuck everybody!”, The Myth Of Happily Ever After’s closing offering Slurpy Slurpy Sleep Sleep encourages us all to “don’t waste your life / love everybody”. If the last two years have affected Biffy’s outlook so dramatically, it’s certainly not compromised the quality of their work.

The Myth Of The Happily Ever After tracklist:

1. DumDum
2. A Hunger In Your Haunt
3. Denier
4. Separate Missions
5. Witch’s Cup
6. Holy Water
7. Errors In The History Of God
8. Haru Urara
9. Unknown Male 01
10. Existed
11. Slurpy Slurpy Sleep Sleep

Watch the official videos for A Hunger In Your Haunt and Unknown Male 01 here.

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.