Ten years is a long time to leave a band in the drawer. Most groups that go quiet for a decade never return, and the ones that do often sound like they’re reading from a script. Sennen, now four friends scattered across London who first met in Norwich more than twenty years ago, have managed something rarer. ‘New Quiet’ is their sixth album and their first since 2015’s ‘First Light’ (Indelabel). It sounds like the work of people who remembered, almost by accident, why they started.
The lineup is the one that has held for years. Larry Holmes and Rich Kelleway share vocals, guitars, and keyboards, Tim Kelleway plays bass, and James Brown handles drums, percussion, and more keys. Everyone writes under the band’s name, and that democracy shows in how the songs are built. Nobody hogs the frame. James Chapman, better known as Maps, added keyboards and programming and mixed the record at Maps HQ. Misha Hering engineered sessions at Holy Mountain Studios, the band tracked more at home, and Antony Ryan mastered at RedRedPaw. A small, close-knit cast, and the music is better for it.
The spark, by the band’s own account, came from digging through their past. A 2021 reissue of their debut mini-album ‘Widows’ (Sonic Cathedral), stirred up memories of playing together in their early twenties, when making noise in a room was reward enough. That rediscovered joy seeps into everything here. The mood is wistful without turning mopey, sentimental without going syrupy, a grown-up gladness that has been out in some weather.
“I Can See The Future” opens the record with a title that sounds almost like a dare, the kind of thing said aloud in a hopeful mood and then second-guessed a moment later. Nothing about it is rushed. Guitars fuzz and glow, keys hover in the background, and the voices arrive warm rather than urgent. Bands with less to prove tend to open this way, with a smile instead of a thesis statement.
“Dig” runs just over four minutes and was one of the early singles, which makes sense the moment it starts. Short, bright, and propulsive, it keeps the fuzz but lets the melody take the lead. “Waking Up” follows, and it calls to mind a gray morning with the radio turned low, that half-conscious hour when a song can slip into the head before the day has been judged. Then “Birds,” a title as plain and open as the sky it names. Some of the shifts in its arrangement slide past on a first pass, but the sweetness stays behind.
The heart of the album is “Here It Comes,” a little over four minutes long. A bittersweet summer anthem, by the band’s own description, and a *Big Star*-style one at that. The refrain insists that things will turn out fine. Nobody in the room is fooling themselves about how fragile that is, and they sing it anyway, wholeheartedly. The genius lies in how completely they mean it while knowing how fragile that promise can be. Holmes has said he wrote it without cynicism, and that comes through in every line. It’s a song for anyone who has ever needed to say something comforting out loud, to a friend or to themselves, and hoped it would stick. By the second chorus, humming along feels automatic, as though the tune had been around for years.
“Today’s The Day” keeps that optimistic pulse going, a title that practically begs to be shouted from a van window. “Waves” lets the pace ease, and its water imagery suits a band long fond of tides and of things washing back in. “Something Made Me Think Of You” closes the album on a gentle, nostalgic note, like someone quietly switching off the lamp. Small, tender, perfectly judged: a farewell for a record that cares about memory nearly as much as sound.
The affection between the players is easy to hear. The vocals blend like family harmonies, the keyboards glimmer in the corners, and the rhythm section moves like old friends finishing each other’s sentences. Sennen never come across as imitators. The warmth belongs to them alone.
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