Pet Shop Boys announced their upcoming fourteenth studio album Hotspot this week with the release of the LP’s gorgeous second single, “Burning The Heather,” a dreamy, autumnal ballad written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, produced by Stuart Price and featuring ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler on acoustic guitar.

The follow-up to lead single “Dreamland,” “Burning The Heather” tells a somber story of a man who walks into a bar in an unfamiliar town and is unfairly characterized by the barkeep as a “bread-head,” which is a British word for someone who’s motivated by, or obsessed with, making money (“You’ve got me all wrong / That's what I'm sensing / I’m not one of those bread-heads / always pounds, shillings and pence-ing”). Actually, though, he’s just an ordinary single man who’s gone out for a wander and a drink by himself (“You’ve got me all wrong / There's no one I'm missing / I'm quite happy to be alone / There are no lips I’m kissing”).

Part of the song’s hazy hook (“Autumn is here / And they're burning the heather / Sheepdogs are running / Hell for leather”) was inspired by Tennant’s time spent in one of the many Moors (large areas of untamed vegetation and shrubbery including heather) of Northern England where he used to have a home studio. As he told the BBC’s Radio 6 recently, “One day I was driving across the Moors and it was autumn and they were burning the heather, which they do to stimulate growth. And I just thought, ‘autumn is here and they’re burning the heather—that’s a lyric.’”

There’s a strand of ennui that runs through the entire song in both its lyrics (“Where did I come from? / Where do I go? / Time is so heartless / You don’t want to know”) and the slow, gauzy chug of its electronic-tinged arrangement driven by Butler’s acoustic strumming.

In an oddly beautiful way, “Burning The Heather” feels like the much more mature and life-experienced bookend to the duo’s 1996 Latin-flecked thumper “Single” where Tennant was singing about the glamour of being a young single man traveling the world (“Ordering a boarding pass / Travelling in business class / This is the name of the game / I'm single, bilingual / Single, bilingual.”)

Now, though, in “Burning The Heather,” the single man Tennant sings of is almost twenty-five years older and seemingly keeping a happily low profile existence (“I'm a stranger in this town / But that's as far as it goes / And where I am bound / No one knows.”)

Hotspot will feature ten new songs written by Tennant and Lowe (except for “Dreamland” which was co-written with Olly Alexander of Years & Years). Tennant has called the album their “Berlin album” since they recorded most of it in West Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios where David Bowie recorded Low (1977) and Heroes (1977), Iggy Pop recorded Lust For Life (1977), and U2 recorded Achtung Baby (1991).

*Hotspot* is set to arrive in stores January 24th

In their recent BBC Radio 6 interview, Tennant promised that Hotspot will have a more organic sound than their recent studio efforts, “The last two albums—Electric and Super—have been super digital hyper-pop,” he revealed, “but this one sounds much more sort of ‘analogue-y’”

Available to pre-order here, Hotspot will be released on January 24th (certainly a “Red Letter Day” for us PSB fans) via x2 Recordings Ltd.

Track Listing:

01 “Will-O-The-Wisp”
02 “You Are The One”
03 “Happy People”
04 “Dreamland” (featuring Years & Years)
05 “Hoping For A Miracle”
06 “I Don’t Wanna”
07 “Monkey Business”
08 “Only The Dark”
09 “Burning The Heather”
10 “Wedding In Berlin”

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