Almost 25 years after their last release, The Samurai Seven are finally back with new music.
And Make It Real isn’t a band simply revisiting what they did in the ’90s.
The four-track EP exists because Simon Williams, Matt Williams, Jimmy Martin and Chris Hayward got back into a rehearsal room last year with no real plans beyond playing together again. Instead, they rediscovered just how much they enjoyed being a band – and Simon almost immediately started writing new songs.
“Playing together again was so joyful and thrilling,” he explains. “I started having new song ideas almost immediately; which was more exciting to us than just rehashing old stuff.”
Considering how abruptly The Samurai Seven’s original momentum was taken away from them, there’s something particularly lovely about that.
Back in the late ‘90s, things were moving quickly. The band recorded five Peel Sessions, released music through Fierce Panda and Shifty Disco, appeared at Radio 1’s Oxford Sound City and even recorded the theme for John Peel’s TV series Sounds of the Suburbs.
Then Simon was shot in the eye during a random drive-by attack.
The NHS was able to save his sight, but the long recovery understandably brought everything to a halt. The Samurai Seven eventually released debut album Le Sport in 2002, before life took everyone in different directions.
The friendships remained, though, and more than two decades later that spontaneous rehearsal has now led to Make It Real.
We’ve already heard two very different sides of the EP.
Punching Down brought back the band’s frantic pop-punk energy with a song taking aim at right-wing attitudes, while Duck and Cover slowed things down considerably, pairing swampier guitars with lyrics about enjoying life while the possibility of global catastrophe once again hangs somewhere in the background.
The two remaining tracks prove the reunion has plenty more to offer.
Title track Make It Real pulls together ’60s pop and ‘90s power-pop while questioning authenticity in an increasingly AI-dominated world. You Love Me Too Much, meanwhile, takes us back towards the sound that once led Oxford’s Nightshift to describe the band as a meeting point between The Beatles and The Undertones.
There’s a nice symmetry to a band returning after almost a quarter of a century with a song called Make It Real, particularly when their comeback happened about as organically as it possibly could.
There was no grand reunion plan. No attempt to recreate their younger years. Four old friends played together again, realised it still felt brilliant and discovered they had new songs they actually wanted people to hear.
Those songs were recorded with Grammy-winning producer Hugo Nicolson at Runway Studios before being mixed at Fairport Convention’s Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire.
And now the reunion is heading properly back onto the stage too.
The Samurai Seven will support The Glorias at Portsmouth’s Wedgewood Rooms on 20 September before joining The Boo Radleys for dates across the UK in November, including Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Lewes and London.
Then comes a particularly fitting ending to this chapter: a hometown headline show at The Bullingdon in Oxford on 19 November.
Nearly 25 years is an awfully long time between releases.
But Make It Real doesn’t feel like The Samurai Seven trying to recover something that disappeared all those years ago. It feels like four friends unexpectedly discovering that their band still has somewhere new to go.
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