For a guy who’s always had a tendency toward the melancholy, “Love’s Coming Back” sure feels like a shift in a more hopeful direction. “The ghost of Leonard Cohen softly whispered, ‘Get off my street, sonny,’ into my ear, so I thought it pertinent to take heed and rediscover my more upbeat side,” says Pete Fijalkowski.
Now going by Pete Fij, the English singer, songwriter and guitarist is perhaps best known for his early-’90s run with Adorable, an undervalued Creation Records act. In shoegaze/Brit-pop circles, Adorable’s 1993 LP, Against Perfection, is considered a lost classic. In the 2000s, Fij joined his brother Krzys to form Polak. That was followed by a lengthy period of inactivity he’s described as a “musical breakdown.” Fij later re-emerged as one half of a duo with House Of Love guitarist Terry Bickers for two well-received albums in 2014 (Broken Heart Surgery) and 2017 (We Are Millionaires).
During the pandemic, Fij worked in a care home, serving as a funeral celebrant. The experience was life changing. “It made me appreciate the need to embrace the here and now and try to live life with as few regrets as possible,” he says. “And that’s helped me focus on pushing into this new direction I’ve plotted for some years.”
The full fruits of that reboot are coming next year in the form of an upcoming solo LP fittingly titled Up’s The New Down. “The album definitely has a theme of embracing positivity,” says Fij. “‘Love’s Coming Back’ is the blueprint for my new manifesto: making a conscious decision to ditch the downbeat. However, as per usual, I’m never able to be relentlessly cheerful all the time, so there’s always some dark clouds amongst the sunshine.”
“Love’s Coming Back” also finds Fij reconnecting with the fuzzed-out guitars and dream-pop textures of Adorable, which reformed for one week in 2019 for a series of shows. “Getting the band back together full time was never on the cards, but it did awaken my love of the energy of distorted guitars,” says Fij. “It wasn’t a conscious decision to recapture a sound. But I suppose the fact that I’m leading the guitar charge again for the first time since Adorable means there’s more in common with that past sonic history.”
We’re proud to premiere Pete Fij’s “Loves Come Back.”
—Hobart Rowland
