By the time Jason Pierce—Spiritualized’s spaceman-in-residence—got around to finishing And Nothing Hurt, he’d burned through money, patience, and what little conventional studio process he might’ve still had. “I kind of ran out of money fast trying to pursue something that didn’t work,” he says, flatly. The result is a painstaking patchwork of timpani, glockenspiel, upright bass, and Casio keyboards recorded in isolation and then stitched together into one of the most heartbreakingly gorgeous albums of his career.
“I recorded a lot at home,” Pierce explains, “but anything that wouldn’t go up the stairs I went to a studio to record.” It’s not the first time he’s made beauty out of chaos, but this time he seems a bit wearier for it. “If I thought about it, I would have written the songs and gone to a studio and put that together in some way. But it was never played live… hindsight makes everything obvious.”
This, from a man who once tried to capture the scale of the cosmos in a single chord. But And Nothing Hurt feels more earthbound—anchored in aging, memory, and the fragile mechanics of making anything at all. “There’s a lot of stuff that goes down that you think you’re never going to get again,” he says. “You want people to hear all those moments in a record—and obviously, that’s not how people put out records.”
Still, in an era when artists can release a hundred alternate versions with the click of a button, Pierce has considered letting fans into the mess. “Now I’m kind of free again,” he says. “I’ve been putting together some little bits so you can kind of hear the content in a different way.” For a guy obsessed with Brian Wilson’s Smile sessions, the appeal of raw fragments clearly lingers.
The album’s title, And Nothing Hurt, is a quiet nod to Slaughterhouse-Five—yes, that line. “I like that it begins with ‘and,’” Pierce says. “It presupposes something before. There’s a kind of sarcasm and cynicism in Vonnegut that I like.” Of course, if you’re the kind of listener who’s been floating along with Spiritualized since the ‘90s, you might also hear echoes of the line from Stop Your Crying: “Nothing hurts you like the pain of someone you love.” Pierce laughs when confronted with his own lyrical ghosts. “Many people have accused me of writing the same song for the whole of my life,” he shrugs. “But those themes—those things—you can’t get away from them.”
Even when the sound shifts—A Perfect Miracle and Hey Jane being spiritual cousins only in name—the ache remains. And if A Perfect Miracle recalls the emotional payload of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, there’s good reason. Touring that album in full reminded Pierce of “the immense power and glory of playing those songs… like someone else was stirring it.” That sensation bled into the new material, even if he didn’t quite realize it at first. “Only two weeks ago I found that if I play A Perfect Miracle one tone higher, it sounds even more like that track. But it passed me by when I was doing it.”
If the past keeps bleeding into the present, Pierce is at least intentional about it. The space suit featured in recent press photos? Same one from the Do It All Over Again video. “It was all about the passing of time—wisdom and stupidity and everything to do with that,” he says. Space may be lonely, but Earth isn’t much better, and And Nothing Hurt wears that ache like a second skin.
Pierce is aware of the whispers that this might be Spiritualized’s final album. And yes, he meant it when he said it might be. “It’s harder to make records when you’re older and not feel like you’re just… putting one out because that’s what’s required,” he says. “There has to be a good reason.” But when asked directly if this is really the end, he laughs. “I’m good. I’m not done. I’m joking about looking for a way out.”
The road ahead includes more shows—“this is where it starts to get good”—and maybe a better way of assembling the next one. “I think I’ve learned the process has so much to do with it,” he says. “But there were times where I thought: this should be so much easier than this.”
As for the long-dreamed Spacemen 3 reunion? Don’t hold your breath. “Same old, same old,” Pierce says. “I find it really difficult to see why. People just replaying their past… I call it battle reenactment. But then I saw The Stooges play Raw Power and it was the best show I’ve ever seen. So I’m not against other people doing it. I just don’t see me doing it.”
Which is fine. We’ve got And Nothing Hurt, a record that sounds like it cost him everything and somehow came back with even more. If this is the end, it’s a hell of a way to float out into space.
Listen to the interview above and check out the video below!
