Pet Shop Boys ‘Electric’: Hear “Bolshy,” “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct” & “Shouting In The Evening”

Robbie Daw | July 3, 2013 6:28 am

Electric, the 12th studio album from Pet Shop Boys, arrives on July 16. And if you’re not already dancing to The Rite Of Spring over the fact that Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have crafted their most up-tempo LP since the seminal Very, then you need to sit down and have a read of our extensive interview with the duo about it all. But if you should need aural proof — something more than the previously-released songs “Axis” and “Vocal” — then you’re in luck, because a trio of the album’s tracks (or at least snippets of them) have popped up online over the past week.

Stuart Price produced Electric, and his influence is evident all across the record; from the first synth squelches of opening track “Axis” to the pounding beats of final number “Vocal,” it seems that the British producer pushed Neil and Chris to get back to their clubby roots.

Below, get a further taste of Electric via the tracks “Bolshy,” “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct” & “Shouting In The Evening.”

Pet Shop Boys, “Bolshy”: During our interview, Neil Tennant explained that about half of the tracks on Electric were actually written during the sessions for previous album Elysium. “The new songs were ‘Love Is A Bourgeois Construct,’ ‘Bolshy’,” he said. “‘Fluorescent” was only written in the last six weeks.”

Pet Shop Boys, “Love Is A Bourgeois Construct”: As he often does, Tennant once again turned to literature for inspiration here — this time it was the David Lodge book Nice Work. He explained, “…in that novel, a university lecturer in English has to shadow a guy who runs an old-fashioned industrial factory in Birmingham. In the course of this, the guy who runs the company falls in love with the lecturer, who he can’t stand in the beginning. There’s a great moment where she says to him, ‘Love is just a construct of Victorian fiction. It’s a middle class idea.’ It just gave me the idea of the phrase ‘love is a bourgeois construct’.”

Pet Shop Boys, “Shouting In The Evening”: Neil Tennant noted, “‘Axis’ was written right at the beginning of Elysium. ‘Vocal’ was almost the first thing we wrote for Elysium. And then ‘Shouting In The Evening,’ there was kind of a rough demo of it.”

Electric is out July 16. Are you liking what you’ve heard so far? Let us know below, or by hitting us up on Facebook and Twitter!