Cult Australian band the Apartments are releasing their eighth studio album after a five-year gap. In their crepuscular world, romantic attachments from the past gain renewed life through songs. Robert Plummer likes the misery.

Sydney-born and Brisbane-bred, Peter Milton Walsh has been plying his trade as a singer-songwriter since 1978. What Mark E Smith was to the Fall, he is to the Apartments, although in his case, record books list a mere 18 former group members. However, that’s where the similarities between the two bands end.

The Apartments play mood music for moody people. Tunes for all the dive bars in all the heartbreak hotels of the world. Songs for those nights when you know you’re going to have the mother of all hangovers in the morning.

There are eight songs on this album and practically every one of them is an elegy for a doomed relationship. They inhabit the dark places of the mind and the soul. “You were always my favourite lost cause,” confides Walsh on opening number It’s A Casino Life, before adding: “I lost count of all the drugs you were on.”

The pattern repeats itself on Afternoons (“I loved the world that came with you”) and A Handful Of Tomorrow (“I loved you while the music played”). Always the same wistful, sorrowful musical setting, slow and drawn-out, like a dream from which the singer is struggling to awake. Soft piano, gently strummed guitar: nothing to frighten the horses, nothing to detract from the exquisite lyrical heartache.

Subtle tonal variations do emerge over time. Natasha Perot duets on Afternoons; Nick Kennedy’s drums are more forceful during A Handful Of Tomorrow; Another Sun Gone Down is buoyed by Jeff Crawley’s plaintive trumpet. But these are details that take several listens to appreciate fully.

That’s What The Music Is For (When The Fair’s Over) finds Walsh trying to reverse the passage of time by exercising his craft. “November again, time to give in to the dark,” he laments: it’s not nightfall yet, but it’s getting there. “Bring back the days that had you in them/That’s what the music is for.”

Despite his high-quality songwriting, Walsh has enjoyed little commercial success in his nearly five decades of activity. So it’s disturbing to hear him suggest, in the song of the same name, that “death would be my best career move”. Worse, he seems to be only half-joking – but the joke is a good one, albeit delivered in the driest, most deadpan fashion.

Many activists like to say that the personal is political: in the Apartments’ worldview, it’s the other way round. “Tonight, I can write the saddest lines,” sings Walsh at the start of The American Resistance, leaving listeners musing that whatever’s coming next, he’s already given it stiff competition. In the end, it’s another failed love affair, the one between citizen and country: “America has fallen now/Resistance risin’ in every town.”

Things come to a head in the bleak six-minute epic You Know We’re Not Supposed To Feel This Way. “She says I can’t stand it/Stand it anyway or else you can’t go on,” sings Walsh. It’s an entreaty that brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s famous quotation, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Ultimately, this album bears witness to the power of music to immortalise lovers and feelings. “If I sing this song maybe you won’t disappear,” runs the closing song. But the protagonist knows full well that he’s fighting a losing battle.

Another lyric brings a deeper understanding: the people do disappear, but the object of the game is to produce songs that will outlive them. “I’ve seen so many come and go/The music stays, the singer goes,” sings Walsh.

The final line of the record gets to the heart of the matter: “Are you there in the songs that I’ll leave behind?” It’s a fitting closure to a work characterised by its utter seriousness of purpose. Walsh may have set himself a daunting task, but those who have ears to hear may find that these songs will long endure in their hearts and minds.

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You can find the Apartments online at https://www.theapartments-music.com/. You can order their album on Bandcamp here. They are also on Facebook here.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at his author’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.