There’s not a lot that counts as “drop everything” news when you’re writing about music that was largely released 20 to 30 years ago, but when one of the progenitors of the genre comes out with a new track for the first time in a decade and a half, it rates.

Here, we’re talking about Bauhaus and their first new music since 2008’s Go Away White. The track is accompanied with the following release detailing the process of its creation:

“Drink The New Wine” was recorded last year during lockdown with the four members sharing audio files. The track employs the Surrealists’ ‘Exquisite Corpse’ device whereby each artist adds to the piece without seeing what the others have done. Bauhaus have used this technique in the past to great effect. The title refers to the very first Cadavre exquis’ drawing rendered by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy which included words which when strung together made up the sentence, ‘Le cadavre exquis boiara le vin nouveau’ (‘The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”) For the recording, the four musicians each had one minute and eight tracks at their disposal plus a shared sixty seconds plus four tracks for a composite at the end. All done without hearing what the others had laid down. The only common link being a prerecorded beat courtesy of Kevin. The final playback came as synchronistic revelation.

Bauhaus

It’s kind of comforting to know that even Bauhaus got bored during lockdowns like the rest of us.