“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LOSE EVERYTHING? YOU JUST START AGAIN!”

And just like that, we’re back in 2005. It’s hard to believe, but Maxïmo Park‘s Mercury Prize-nominated debut album is now officially 20 and we’re feeling very, very old.

But fear not! Last month saw the Geordie art-rockers release a bumper, 20th anniversary edition of the record, which featured the original alongside plus a full collection of B-sides, demo versions, never-heard alternative edits and radio session tracks.

To mark the milestone, we’ve got frontman Paul Smith and drummer Tom English to offer a track by track breakdown of the whole record. A handy tool to reacquaint yourself and bath in nostalgia, really, when you’ll be able to hear it in full on their upcoming 2026 tour. For now, over to Paul…

‘Signal and Sign’

Paul: “We thought this punchy song would be a great way to open our first record (“a new direction, a new dawn”), but we also wanted to delay the listener’s gratification with the lengthy drum fade-in. Hopefully, the prospective listener will crank up the volume so that when the guitar riff arrives, it hits even harder. Sorry to all headphone listeners! The lyrics, like many on the album, are a balance of simple emotional outbursts and a hint of more thoughtful content; youthful angst versus the study of Semiotics, in this case! The opening line came from waiting in a train station on my 2-hour journey home from working as a part-time art teacher, and it mirrored the wait for the world to hear our music.”

‘Apply Some Pressure’

Paul: “We knew early on that this song had the potential to reach a lot of people, but we had no idea how the ambiguity of the central premise (“What happens when you lose everything? You just start again, you start all over again”) would strike a chord with so many, each with their own individual interpretation. For me, the song’s main, angular riff was so catchy that I wanted to sing along with it, and it felt humourous in some way, which helps to undercut the ‘life and death’ lyrical themes. The episodic arrangement still thrills me to this day, and allows for each section to have its own musical and lyrical personality, switching from the self-referential (“Write a review? Well how objective can I be?”) to the universal idea of loss and renewal. As with a lot of our songs, the advice within the song is directed towards myself as much as anyone else – we always try to be inclusive rather than didactic. The song is about someone who comes into your life and rearranges your brain, which is reflected in the music that Dunc wrote for this one.”

‘Graffiti’

Paul: “Dunc’s barnstorming riff that explodes into life after a teasing build-up was memorably dubbed a “pint-spiller” by Warp Records’ Steve Beckett, the brilliant man who signed our band, who envisaged the reaction in nightclubs up and down the land, as drinkers raced to the indie-disco dancefloor on hearing the song’s intro. While I’d like to think our band has avoided the musically-conservative trappings of laddish indie-guitar bands, I can’t deny the accuracy of Steve’s prophetic words, and it is a pleasure to know songs like this have soundtracked the formative years of many an alternative reveller. Hopefully, our music was a comfort to outsiders everywhere, as expressed in the lyric, “What are we doing here if romance isn’t dead?”, which could almost be a manifesto for the band. When I first joined the band, there were a few songs that already had lyrics that I liked but wanted to embellish and revise, this being the main one. I was intrigued by Dunc’s reference line about graffiti and singing in French, which reminded me of the French Situationists in 1968, hence the next line – a call to action for romantics everywhere!”

‘Postcard of a Painting’

Paul: “This almost didn’t make the album because we were worried it sounded a bit like The Smiths, which is no bad thing, but with a first album, you’re really trying to create a distinctive new voice. Ultimately, it felt too good to resist, especially after adding a Doo-Wop/Barbershop backing vocal. As with the rest of the record, Paul Epworth’s razor-sharp production helped distance the song from any subconscious influences. I wrote the lyrics after realising a burgeoning, long-distance relationship wasn’t going to work, but the idea of sending a postcard of your favourite painting was another romantic (possibly archaic) idea. This epistolary tale of heartbreak is offset by the middle-eight’s humorous reference to a lack of the author’s usual fastidiousness. It was important to me that the lyrics on this and subsequent albums didn’t take themselves too seriously – the music is ultimately meant to be enjoyable, and we were having lot of fun, being in a new band together.”

‘Going Missing’

Paul: “We always felt there was something euphoric about this song, despite the existential angst that runs throughout its duration. We were unashamed of our pop sensibility, and we thought of almost every song as a potential single. To us, every element of the music needs to matter – we want every moment to fulfil a purpose. I think this song is a prime example – the guitar riff is so distinctive but the keyboard comes into its own at various points, like the stripped-back outro, for example. The rhythm section drives the song along, as always, but I love the way Archis’s bass pops out with a short melodic run in the instrumental chorus. Like a lot of the songs on this record, it’s about escape, in this case from yourself and the negative patterns that can develop after the break-up of a long-term relationship. The chorus line makes me think of the title sequence from ‘70s British sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, where the title character leaves his clothes on a beach and fakes his own death – tragicomic, more than genuinely tragic.”

‘I Want You To Stay’

Tom: “Unlike the majority of material on the album, ‘I Want You To Stay’ was originally written on a keyboard, by Lukas, which automatically gave it a completely different flavour, both in terms of the chord structure and the way it was produced. The first half is super-staccato, punctuated with swooshes and bleeps – not exactly the sound of a band in a room but still visceral – brilliantly setting up the outro, where the guitars open up and everything crescendos underneath Paul’s last two lines. Having played the song live regularly over the years, I think Paul may’ve lived to regret the primal howl of that final ‘feeeeeeeeeeel’, but it was worth it.”

‘Limassol’

Tom: “‘Limassol’ is a very special tune that Archis wrote during the earliest days of the band. I vividly remember hearing it for the first time, watching him play it, solo, on an acoustic guitar in his house, just down the street from mine. It was a genuinely magical experience; I felt so lucky and excited to have a part to play. As each of us learnt the song and came up with our parts, his musical arrangement never changed: the way each section lurches into the next, the quirky half-time breakdowns, the soaring instrumental section in the middle with its heavy, off-beat climax. It was pointless and impossible to mess with. Paul changed most of the words, keeping the titular chorus cry (none of us have still ever been there, which we must do something about…) and Lukas gave it the arpeggiated keyboard intro riff, which, combined with the heavy, driving guitars, did a lot to define our early sound and quickly became a live favourite.”

‘The Coast is Always Changing’

Paul: “This song, along with ‘The Night I Lost My Head’ were both recorded slightly before the rest of the album, in a London studio called 2KHz, and they constituted our first double A-side single on Warp. We were so happy to sign with such a legendary independent label, and they gave us complete artistic freedom, which is what we were after, ultimately. Despite a reputation for more esoteric music, they were aware of our pop leanings, which are firmly to the fore on this song. I wanted there to be a conversational feel to the verse lyrics, which, like the chorus’s words, are quite straightforward (and melancholy), matching the music. The intro and the middle eight are much more jagged, and so there are lots of pleasing contrasts in the arrangement. We worked on the structure in a bit more detail than some of the other songs, until the switches in mood and rhythm felt natural.

“Most songs were already well-honed before we got into the studio, but if there were any lingering questions we had, Paul Epworth would act as a sixth member of the band, which kept the momentum going. The title refers to a place called Blast Beach in Seaham, on the North-East coast, which was transformed into a sulphurous, alien landscape by an industrial explosion. Although the song is rooted in a quite explicit example of coastal erosion, the listener should feel free to apply to it their own metaphor about change and time’s incessant march.”

‘The Night I Lost My Head’

Paul: “This song is another attempt to wrench some humour from a chaotic love life! My favourite lyricists were singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, so I was keen to emulate certain aspects of their craft, including being honest about desire and how flawed we can be when engaged in romantic pursuits. A hooky Pop device is using numbers or counting in a song, so the simplicity of that approach is combined with lascivious allusions in a lyrical raised eyebrow towards the listener. It occurs to me now that the ‘6-digit fix’ dates me to a time when landlines were still a thing… As in ‘Now I’m All Over the Shop’, there’s more colloquial language, like the word ‘mucky’.

“It was important to me that the songs should contain elements of everyday speech, especially since the songs were focussed on the magic of our normal lives. The music is ridiculously simple, but I was very into early rock ‘n’ roll music, like Eddie Cochran, and wanted to capture that rawness, while alluding to the Doo-Wop music of the 1950s, too. I think I remember telling Lukas to go full Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano!”

‘Once, a Glimpse’

Tom: “Duncan came up with a lot of the music on A Certain Trigger while we were both living in a first floor flat in Fenham, in the west end of Newcastle, which was also our (very cramped) rehearsal space and demo studio. Lukas lived on the ground floor, which gave us slightly more license to make noise, but this song must’ve really tested the patience of our other neighbours. Channelling influences like Can, Devo and Wire, it’s taut, relentless and about as heavy as we could handle in that tiny room.”

‘Now I’m All Over the Shop’

Tom: “Unlike ‘Glimpse’, this song wasn’t always so rapid but Paul Epworth encouraged us to play it as fast as we could. Quite a few of them were given this treatment, in fact, which made the recording process a lot more gruelling than I was expecting. I was 25 then and still could only manage a couple of takes. A physiotherapist may well be required on the 20^th anniversary tour next year. Epworth was right, though; the hectic pace makes it both more fun and more weird, which is as it should be.”

‘Acrobat’

Tom: “I’m fairly sure that this is the only song we hadn’t played live before it was recorded and, because we used a drum machine and it’s spoken word in the verses, it was another couple of years until we would first attempt it. So no one else heard it before it was released, and then only if they bought the album. It was really exciting to have this totally contrasting, ‘studio track’ up our sleeves to surprise the listener with, late on in the running order. We were probably a bit unsure how well it would fit in with all the other ‘rock’ songs, but producer Paul was in no doubt and obviously relished the chance to work with a completely different set of sounds, which he handled with great skill. Five years later, in 2009, it was the first song of our encore at the Royal Albert Hall, with Lukas leading the way on the house organ; a very memorable moment.”

‘Kiss You Better’

Paul: “If ‘Acrobat’ seemed like the obvious choice to end the album, we wanted to defy any expectations and end with a big Pop bang! I wrote this as a companion to ‘The Night I Lost My Head’ – a blend of internal and external conversations that take place on an epic night out. The idea of personal choice and taking control of your own life against all odds is the more intellectual aspect to the lyrics, but, as the listener, you can decide what to engage with – we believed all the songs should be multi-layered, lyrically and musically. Dunc’s guitar is super-dreamy, and creates a nice contrast with the simple chords. Meanwhile, Tom’s drums in the chorus lend the song an elasticity before the song performs a dramatic volte-face! We really amped up the aggression at the end: “You! Are you so scared that you’re just going to let it happen?” – another question to myself as much as anyone else, but a good way to end the album – asking serious questions about life in a fun and joyful way. It remains our goal!”