Andy Bell is in a strangely casual mood for someone who’s just made one of the year’s best rock records. “It almost feels like an album you make on the way to making an album,” he says of This Is Not a Safe Place, as if he’s describing a rough sketch rather than a sharp, fully realized LP. He insists it’s not the “real” follow-up to 2017’s Weather Diaries, but if this is the warm-up, the next one might be too dangerous to handle without gloves.
Bell says the difference came down to speed. Weather Diaries was written and assembled over a long period, with songs arriving from all directions and a deliberate sense of how they’d be received by fans waiting twenty years for a Ride album. This time, “a much shorter list of songs written a lot quicker” meant the record emerged with the looseness of a band that’s stopped auditioning for its own reunion. “It wasn’t a deliberate ‘let’s make an album’ thing,” he shrugs. “The songs got written and that dictated what the album was like.”
This freedom meant they could let “Future Love” breeze along with jangly optimism before dropping the hammer with “Killswitch” and “15 Minutes,” all without worrying about where the shoegaze police might file the complaint. It also meant they could treat the studio like an art project — which, given Bell’s obsessions here, is literal.
Basquiat isn’t just a passing name-check in “Repetition.” Bell paraphrases a line from the artist’s interviews — “people want you to repeat and stay the same” — but spins it away from any accusation of his own fans. “I don’t think our fans are closed-minded,” he says, “but it’s something you hear in certain circles.” That Basquiat quote became a kind of thematic touchstone, reinforced by the album’s cover image and the mysterious three slashes that come from an old street code marking a place as unsafe. “It was allegedly something Basquiat used too,” Bell notes, “signing his name and adding three slashes.”
A Basquiat exhibition in London pulled Bell deep into 80s New York — not just the paintings, but the noise, the bands, the streets. “It felt like revisiting our own art school days in the late 80s,” he says, which in turn sent Ride back to their earliest musical influences. The production on This Is Not a Safe Place draws heavily from post-punk — Public Image Ltd., pre-Surfer Rosa Pixies — right down to chasing a Steve Albini-style drum sound. “We weren’t trying to copy it exactly,” Bell says, “but we knew what we wanted to hear.”
Where Weather Diaries aimed barbs at world leaders (“potshots” is how Bell puts it), the new record turns inward. “Dial Up” begins with the line “Are we living?” and spirals into a meditation on personal anxiety in a tech-choked, environmentally fraying world. “It applies to the big picture,” Bell admits, “but it’s about what’s happening in our own little world. The fallout of when things are really bad globally, and how that plays out personally.”
That blend of personal and political is the thread that keeps This Is Not a Safe Place from drifting into either self-indulgence or generic commentary. The guitars might bite harder in spots, but the human scale is never lost. Bell talks about the heaviness in tracks like “15 Minutes” not as a wall to hide behind but as part of an intentional ebb and flow. “It’s good to pick certain moments on an album to really go for it,” he says, “and other times hold back, so you’ve got that light and shade.”
For all his claims that this record was made on the way to another one, Bell isn’t shy about confirming that more Ride music is coming — a sentence that, ten years ago, would’ve sounded like fan fiction. “It’s a good time,” he says of the band’s current state. “We’re all pitching in, playing to our strengths, and able to communicate more than we used to.” The old days of barely speaking to each other are gone. “It’s between all four of us now. We’ve all been through so much in 20 years, but when we got back in a room, it just clicked again.”
The way Bell tells it, This Is Not a Safe Place is a happy accident: a fast, instinctive, slightly chaotic work that doesn’t feel weighted by expectation. But it also sounds like a band with no interest in simply being the band they used to be. If this is just the album before the “real” follow-up, the real danger might be what happens when Ride decides to take their time.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
