There’s a certain surrealism baked into hearing Tim Butler say, out loud, “It’s good to finally have it coming out.” He’s talking about Made of Rain, the Psychedelic Furs’ first new studio album since 1991, a sentence that feels like it should have an asterisk next to it, or possibly a museum plaque. The band didn’t just take a break—they vanished long enough for entire genres to be born, peak, and get recycled into Spotify playlists with titles like Post-Punk Revival Road Trip.
But here they are. Again. Still.
When Butler and his brother Richard reformed the Furs in the early 2000s, they were in no hurry to re-enter the album-tour-album hamster wheel that burned them out in the first place. “We wanted to make sure we still had the chemistry and things to say,” Tim told me. “Music that would stand up to our past catalog.” Translation: no half-measures, no nostalgia cash grab, no limp victory lap.
Which is probably why Made of Rain took… well, forever. The oldest song on the album, “Wrong Train,” was written in 2004—older than several current indie bands who list the Furs as an influence. They wrote plenty of material over the years, but most of the album didn’t click together until the last six months before recording. You can practically hear the relief in Tim’s voice: “It’s funny how that happens. When you know it’s time, it’s time.”
What’s even stranger—beautifully so—is that the Furs didn’t spend those decades chasing their old sound. They chased the people chasing them. “We were inspired by bands that were inspired by us,” Tim admitted. A perfectly circular lineage. A snake eating its eyeliner-wearing tail. Punk begat post-punk, the Furs helped invent the latter, generations of bands grew up idolizing them, and now the Furs are feeding off the kids who fed off them. It’s such a cosmic loop you wonder why they didn’t name the album Serpent.
Whatever the glue, it worked. Made of Rain doesn’t sound like a museum piece, a reboot, or an “aging legends try their best” record. It’s sharp-edged, atmospheric, alive. Even Tim was relieved at the reaction to the first single, “Don’t Believe”: “We were worried people would think we were just retreading the ’80s. But they heard it and said, ‘Wow, they’re back—and they sound now.’”
Part of that renewal came from making the album more democratic than their late-’80s work. “Everybody had input,” Tim said. Guitarist Rich Good sent ideas. New textures developed. Richard, always the lyrical compass, responded to what hit him immediately and shelved what didn’t. And then there was Richard Fortus—their old Love Spit Love collaborator, current Guns N’ Roses guitarist, and Made of Rain’s co-producer.
Bringing in Fortus wasn’t nostalgia—it was bloodline stewardship. “He saw his idea of the perfect Furs song,” Tim said. “He helped us remember what we were originally about.” Fortus even played guitar on some tracks. It was less “producer” and more “family member pointing you back toward the house you built.”
The album’s textures reflect that mix of old instincts and new electricity. “Come All Ye Faithful” slinks around with a menacing David Essex vibe—Tim name-dropped the song “Lamplight” as its spiritual ancestor. Meanwhile “Don’t Believe,” ironically the last track recorded, surged into being almost by accident. Tim had a verse and chorus; Richard liked the verse, told him to write a new chorus; then the band hit the groove in the studio and realized they’d already found the heart of the song. “The groove is everything on it,” Tim said. It’s the kind of mistake that becomes a single.
And then there’s the time machine: the fact that this reunion coincides with the 40th anniversary of their debut album. Tim had just listened to it again when we spoke. “It sounded really good,” he said, almost surprised. Back then they were a six-piece with saxophone—still an audacious choice in a punk-warped world—jamming songs like “India” for 15 minutes at a time in front of crowds who didn’t know what they were witnessing yet. “We weren’t trying to be ska or anything,” Tim said. “It just happened. Duncan would honk away in the background and eventually it became part of our sound.” Roxy Music meets the Stooges, thrown into a blender with whatever the London fog was carrying that night.
Today, Tim lives a few hours south of my home base in Louisville—in Stanford, Kentucky, where the nightlife ends at whatever time the last porch light goes out. He met his wife on Myspace (“That dates us, doesn’t it?” he laughed), traded Manhattan for quiet land, and says a few locals recognize him but most don’t. Honestly, it’s kind of perfect: an icon of post-punk living on a peaceful patch of Kentucky soil where nobody cares about CBGB war stories unless he brings them up.
But he cares. You can hear it all over Made of Rain. More importantly, you can hear that he still feels the band’s pulse, the old chemistry, the strange alchemy that made the Furs sound like nobody else in 1980—and makes them sound unlike any of their descendants in 2020.
“I’m glad we met expectations,” he told med. Expectations undersells it. They didn’t just return—they arrived. Again.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
