Scottish group Life Without Buildings were only together for a couple years, long enough to release their debut album, Any Other City, in 2001, and break up soon after. They managed to forge a very unique sound in that time, with singer Sue Tompkins’ stream-of-conscious sprechgesang poetry flowing overtop atmospheric, mathy post-punk.
That one album has proven very influential over the last two decades, and even more so since “The Leanover” became a TikTok hit during the pandemic, and you can hear it in groups like English Teacher and Dry Cleaning. For those who have hoped for more Life Without Buildings, the band’s rare final single, “Love Trinity,” is being reissued on 7″ on November 21 by Errol’s Hot Wax & Heavenly Creature. It was the last song they ever recorded and originally released only in Australia, and the only place to hear it unless you owned it was on a low quality YouTube stream.
“Where have 24 years gone? I just hope it sounds good and is a nice object to have and hope it captures something about that moment in time when we recorded it,” says Sue Tompkins.
Guitarist Robert Dallas Gray adds, “It’s nice to mark Love Trinity, as a song — it’s always felt like it slipped through the cracks a bit. It was the last song we recorded, one of the last we wrote. We recorded it as a one-off single for Trifekta Records in Australia, to promote the tour we were going to do there. I think it felt quite different from the other stuff; it came out of Chris’s bassline (which a lot of things did), and it had the delay effect on the guitar, and the sort of big guitar solo. There’s even a part where Sue’s vocals are multi-tracked — so whereas all the previous stuff had deliberately been very dry and live sounding, it was more of a sort of atmospheric thing. I don’t think it was anyone’s favourite at the time, but a lot of people we knew loved it and said it was the best thing we’d done. For me it’s taken on more importance over time, because it feels like a swansong, I guess.”
Listen to “Love Trinity” below.