Frank Turner announces new album Be More Kind

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By ( Louder ) published

Frank Turner will release his 8th album Be More Kind in May – listen to new track 1933 now

A press shot of Frank Turner

Frank Turner has announced that he’ll release his new album titled Be More Kind later this year.

It’s set to arrive on May 4th via Xtra Mile Recordings/Polydor Records and follows 2017’s Songbook retrospective compilation album. To mark the announcement, he’s released a stream of the new track 1933.

Turner says: “I wanted to try and get out of my comfort zone and do something different. Somewhere in the record, there’s a convergence of the ideas of personal and political, which is a central theme of the album.”

The album’s title, Turner says, is based on a line from a Clive James poem called Leçons Des Ténèbres which read: ‘I should have been more kind. It is my fate. To find this out, but find it out too late.’

“It devastated me the first time I read it,” says Turner. “A lot of older, wiser people tend to say things like that, that the things that come out in the wash at the end of a human life are the way you treated the people around you. In the modern world, that’s a lesson that all of us, myself included could do to learn.”

New track 1933 is a reaction to the alt-right, and an article Turner read associating it with punk rock.

Turner says: “That filled me with a mixture of incredulity and anger. The idea that Breitbart or Steve Bannon think they have anything to do with punk rock makes me extremely angry.”

“These ideas are surfacing again that collectively, as a species, we’ve already shot down.”

To celebrate the release of 1933, Turner will be performing a live Facebook Q&A and acoustic version of the track at 19:33 GMT tonight.