Edwyn Collins has today announced both the details of the release of his 10th solo album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation and the release of the first track to be taken from the record, ‘Knowledge’.
Out on his own AED Records on Friday 14th March 2025, the 11-track album was recorded at his Clashnarrow Studio in Helmsdale, North East Scotland and was co-produced by Edwyn with Sean Read & Jake Hutton, who all play on the album.
Also featuring James Walbourne on guitar, William Collins on bass, Carwyn Ellis on guitar, Lena Wright and Bianca White on backing vocals and including two co-writes – ‘The Mountains Are My Home’ with Carwyn and ‘Strange Old World’ with William - the track listing is as follows:
1. Knowledge
2. Paper Planes
3. The Heart Is A Foolish Little Thing
4. The Mountains Are My Home
5. Strange Old World
6. Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation
7. Sounds as A Pound
8. The Bridge Hotel
9. A Little Sign
10. It Must Be Real
11. Rhythm Is My Own World
It opens with an admission and a recognition: “Knowledge is a friend of mine, first was lost and now it’s found…”
It ends with a defiant statement of encouragement: “When you try, try, try again, you succeed… Just to love, love, love again, it’s what you need…”
And in between, the new album from Edwyn Collins – titled, with boundless, life-affirming hope, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation – presents 11 songs of affirmation, resolution and out-and-out catchiness. The onetime Orange Juice man’s 10th solo album, his first since 2019’s Badbea, it might be the beloved singer-songwriter’s most finely wrought, thought-provoking and frankly hummable set of songs in two decades. His fifth album since his life-altering illness in 2005, when two strokes and a bout of MRSA did their level best to kill him, it’s certainly his most optimistic.
Working on the record over the last couple of years and taking its title from an old BBC motto which features on a vintage BBC World Service speaker cabinet that resides in the studio’s live room, the songs on Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation stand amongst his very best.
An Eighties indie icon as leader of the much-loved and lauded Orange Juice, the mid-Nineties’ unlikeliest, pithiest, mickey-taking-est solo star when ‘A Girl Like You’ became a worldwide smash and with fans in high places - Chris Martin invited Edwyn to join Coldplay onstage at Glasgow’s Hampden Park in summer 2022 to sing ‘A Girl Like You’ and Keir Starmer, the PM, listed Orange Juice’s ‘Falling and Laughing’ as one of his Desert Island Discs – Edwyn Collins remains as vital today as he did when he sprang from his Bearsden bedroom in the late 1970s to start his first band The Nu Sonics and Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation stands as testament to that fact.
