Long out of print, The Clientele’s 2003 album The Violet Hour will finally be getting a reissue courtesy of their current home at Merge Records on November 7. It will be the first time the album has been available on vinyl in North America, which is good news for anyone who’s ever checked how much an edition of the record costs on wax (that’d include me).

While many think of Suburban Light as their debut, being as it was released in 2000 and created the template for the band’s hazy sonic portraits of liminal London, it was a compilation of early singles and b-sides; Violet Hour was their first release conceived of and released as a proper album.

Of the record, singer Alasdair MacLean says:

The tapes were finally found in an attic. I listened back to this for the first time in 20 years the other day. The plan was to make something brighter and more commercial after Suburban Light, but no… somehow we ended up with this. I think it was a good accident though. The weirdest and most hypnotic record we made, and a unanimous band fave the last time I checked. 

Alasdair Maclean, The Clientele
@TheClienteleBand

To mark the occasion, the band have released the video for single “House On Fire”, which was originally included as bonus content on the enhanced CD edition of the album and the CDS single, 22 years ago.