Echo & The Bunnymen are returning to the studio with “Apples for Isaac”, their first album of newly written material in more than a decade. Arriving on September 18 via BMG, the record marks the Liverpool band’s thirteenth studio album and opens a new chapter for a group whose catalogue has continued to live through decades of tours, anniversaries and renewed generations of listeners.

The first glimpse arrives with “Brussels Is Haunted”, a song that turns the Belgian capital into a city of ghosts, memories and historical echoes. First played on BBC Radio 6 Music by Chris Hawkins, the track is accompanied by an animated video directed by Belgian filmmaker Jef De Smet, whose visual interpretation expands the song’s portrait of Brussels into a restless landscape inhabited by monuments, artists, lovers, wars and the dead.

At the centre of the recording is Clem Burke, the late Blondie drummer whose contribution to the album represents some of his final studio work. Recorded before his death in April 2025, his performance gives the song its restless momentum, driving Ian McCulloch‘s guitar and vocal through a track that moves between propulsion and reverie. Will Sergeant’s expansive electric guitar adds the scale that has long defined Echo & The Bunnymen, while the chorus introduces a brighter, almost timeless pop sensibility through its reverberating refrain and softly psychedelic “sha-la-la-las.”

There is something deliberately familiar in the song’s architecture. Its retro-pop contours recall the band’s longstanding fascination with the 1960s, a language Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant had already absorbed into their post-punk vocabulary long before later generations rediscovered psychedelia and pop nostalgia. “Brussels Is Haunted” feels like a continuation of that conversation, carrying echoes of the band’s 1987 self-titled album, an association made even more resonant by the fact that part of that record was recorded at ICP Studios in Brussels.

The song’s lyrics transform the city into a vast archive of collective memory. Waterloo and the two world wars exist alongside romance, nightlife, frozen vodka and the eccentric presence of Belgian pop icon Plastic Bertrand. Personal memory and European history occupy the same streets, until Brussels becomes something close to a séance: a city where the past has never entirely stopped speaking.

De Smet’s animated video follows the same logic. Its Brussels is populated by layers of history, cultural memory and absence, with famous figures, landmarks and events moving through the city like traces that refuse to disappear. Art, war, romance and death coexist within the same visual geography, turning the capital into a repository for lives that have passed through it. The credits also acknowledge the use of AI in portions of the imagery.

For Ian McCulloch, the long silence between albums was shaped partly by the pandemic, but the more difficult question was what the songs themselves needed to say. Speaking with MOJO, he explained that he wanted every track to possess a meaning that could endure, even when that meaning remained deliberately elusive. He has also described “Apples for Isaac” as sounding closer to the music he originally imagined than any other album he can remember making.

Clem Burke‘s presence extends far beyond “Brussels Is Haunted.” The drummer appears on ten of the album’s eleven tracks, making his contribution central to the record as a whole. Echo & The Bunnymen have described their longtime friend as “integral to the making of the album,” closing their dedication with a simple and deeply personal message: “Love you Clem X.”

With “Apples for Isaac,” Echo & The Bunnymen return to the studio carrying the weight of their history without remaining trapped inside it. The first single suggests a record where memory, geography, pop instinct and the spectral pull of the past continue to meet in the same place: somewhere between the song and the ghost that remains after it ends.

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Photo: (c) Just Loomis