Colour TV: ¡baby!
(via Tip Top Recordings)
Streaming
Following a self-imposed hiatus of almost two years, south-west based indie pop 4-piece Colour TV are back in action with new single ¡baby! and already aiming for the stars. It’s a song which heralds a new beginning for the band with its original line up, with so much to look forward to in the future.
It’s been two long years since Colour TV’s last single, You Treat This Place Like A Hotel, a song full of vibrant sonic colours and soaring vocals which clearly signposted the way to much bigger things in the future for this band who got together in Cornwall quite by accident. Plans were in place to include this on a forthcoming EP and the band had a new shape and purpose. However, an enforced hiatus somewhat put a brake on things, and the TV became silent for a while.
But just to prove that time can be a great healer, the energy was eventually re-ignited, and the relaunch of Colour TV was confirmed. This new beginning heralded a return to the original line up of the band consisting of Sam Durneen’s sensitive and poetic lyricism, Jack Yeo’s melodic guitar with its distinctive edge, and the urgent rhythms from both James Elliott on bass and Sean Goldsmith on drums. And all of this manifests itself in Colour TV’s new single, ¡baby!, a song which very much hinges on the prophetic refrain, “It’s never gonna feel how it did when you were younger.”
¡baby! opens with the line “On the day I cursed and cast you away”, referencing back to the events of the previous year almost as if an apology, but then clearly steers down a different path of proactive rejection. It’s a song in which Sam’s sweet and melodious tones are initially illuminated by the spectre of The Smiths but quickly gravitate into an urgent frenzy of Suede style angst as the realities of life and a lost love kick in. However, even then there is time for a haunting, almost ethereal sense of reflection before the song reverts back to type, whilst still concluding with the merest sense of what could have been had life not taken this difficult path.
The band themselves have some bold and prophetic words to say about both this single and themselves as follows, “¡baby! is the second-best break-up song ever written, after Knowing Me, Knowing You. Every sad boy band on Earth should aspire to be as romantic and pregnable as Fontaines DC, who’ve set this biblical watermark. ¡baby! is the doctrine of a ‘Skinty Fia’ disciple, but we’ve got more to say about sex and jealousy than Grian, because we’re not as good-looking. These themes are magnified in all our forthcoming material but today ¡baby! is ambitious, agonising and artful in ways that bands seem shy to be. If we sound combative, we are. If you’re looking for something to fall in love with, we’re here.”
Aside from all this, it also transpires that ¡baby! is the first of a series of tracks written earlier in the Spring while the band members were miles apart from each other with no idea where getting Colour TV back together would go. Seemingly the chorus of “I loved you like a sun, stung you like a mutha” convinced everyone it would be worth it, and thankfully here we are now. This release also has the benefit of an accompanying ‘secret’ track (Still We Share The Stars) which, as the band put it, “is designed to simulate flipping a 45 to discover gold dust on Side B.”
¡baby! is a single which clearly demonstrates that Colour TV are most definitely back in the fold and are on a mission to impart upon us the cathartic release of first-hand grief. Based on what we have heard so far from them, this could be quite a journey so there is much to look forward to in 2026.
You can stream the single here.
You can find Colour TV on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram and their website.
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All words by Ian Corbridge. You can find more of his writing at his author profile here.
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