Gomez - Liquid Skin (20th Anniversary Edition \ Deluxe) (2019)

Mercury prize winning, British band Gomez have announced the 20th anniversary release of their second album Liquid Skin. Abbey Road’s Frank Arkwright has delved into the archives to remaster ‘Liquid Skin’ from the original tapes which will be released via Virgin/UMC on 12 July as a special 2CD or 2LP standard & coloured vinyl edition featuring 19 unreleased tracks.

Surrounded by instruments, broken toys and a four-track recorder, Gomez recorded large parts of their debut album Bring It On in a garage in their hometown of Southport. To create its follow-up, Liquid Skin, the group would expand their horizons sonically and geographically, visiting America, an ill-fated English stately home & some of the finest recording studios in the world between 1998 and 1999.

There was no pause between Bring It On and Liquid Skin – the records were released just 518 days apart. “The first album and this one merge into one in a lot of ways. A lot of the tracks were written at the same time” explains singer/guitarist Ben Ottewell. “There’s a song called ‘Bring It On’ on Liquid Skin, which says it all really. They were made very closely together, so it seemed like part of the same process. We were constantly making records”.

As a result, writing and recording for Gomez’s second album did not so much have a definitive start but instead it emerged out of the same creative energy as their debut, although it soon took its own distinctive path.

Gomez’s drummer Olly Peacock commented; “Liquid Skin was the step from the four track and recording in a garage to us accepting – in the most ridiculous way – that we were now doing music professionally. ‘Oh s_t we somehow got our record deal, we are a band and we go to the studio now. We’re not going to be hacking it all together.’ There was an excitement because there were less limitations.”

“We were just using things we had access to… and for this album we had access to an orchestra! We just had a broader palette and we were getting more confident” added Ottewell.

Going to Number 2 in the UK Album Chart on its release in September 1999, Liquid Skin not only justified the label’s faith to allow the band to work how and where they wanted, but it saw the British band crystallize their unique sound & grow audiences in America, Australia and other parts of the world, confirming that their Mercury Prize-winning debut was no fluke.

The new Liquid Skin deluxe 2CD will include 5 previously unreleased tracks, 4 previously unreleased alternate versions and 9 live tracks recorded at The Fillmore in San Francisco in 2000. There will be an accompanying remastered double LP release on black 180g vinyl and a limited D2C transparent edition too.