Rising Scottish Punks Cold Years Release New Album 'A Different Life'

MNRK UK and Cold Years are excited to announce the release of A Different Life, the rising Scottish rock quartet’s brand new full-length album.

Recorded at The Barber Shop Studios in New Jersey by producer Brett Romnes (Anxious, Hot Mulligan, Boston Manor, The Movielife), A Different Life is packed with songs that are both intensely personal and universally relatable, and follows Paradise, the band’s 2020 politically-charged look at life in their hometown of Aberdeen, and 2022’s soaring and musically daring follow-up, Goodbye To Misery.

Cold Years also release their new single, “Low,” which is one of the more melancholic moments found on A Different Life that discusses that feeling like you’re in a rut and you realize you need to get out of it. 

There are some albums that immediately transcend time and space, regardless of genre, while simultaneously capturing the very moment out of which they were born. It’s an incredibly difficult balance to get right, but with their third full-length, Aberdeen’s Cold Years have done just that. Because from the moment A Different Life blasts off with the pounding beat of opener “Over” — a riotous punk anthem about removing a toxic person from your life — this album manages to make sense of a world that’s lost most of it. Simultaneously, it also feels like the record you’ve been waiting for to fill the void in your life for your entire life. You can feel it in these songs. That’s something the band — Ross Gordon (vocals/guitar), Finlay Urquhart (guitar), Louis Craighead (bass) and new drummer Jimmy Taylor — noticed as well.

“This is the first time I’ve ever come out of a studio able to listen to the tracks, where, and I say this 100% with conviction, we went in and did everything we wanted to do and more,” says Gordon. “I’ve never done that. I’ve always come out feeling like we could have done something better or different. But this album changed the game for all of us as a band. We didn’t just do twelve tracks that sound the same. We tried to make things a little different. That happened naturally, and it’s the most musical experience I’ve ever had. I definitely feel a confidence with this record that I didn’t feel on the others.” 

The band entered this process with the idea of deliberately making a rock record, something increasingly rare these days as the genre has slipped somewhat outside of the mainstream. But it also afforded the band the freedom to test and explore those different waters, both in terms of the genre itself and the band’s own sound. After that opening blast of “Over,” the record continues with the scorching energy of “Roll With It,” a song that boasts one of the most infectious choruses rock music has heard in recent years. 

The faster, more up-tempo songs like “Radio” (a joyously melancholy track about leaving the small town you grew up in, and people who you grew up with, behind), “Choke” (an incisive invective about the current political state of the UK) and the (self-)contemplative “Youth” all position Cold Years as a band who aren’t just ready to take things to the next level, but have reached it already. It’s far too easy to imagine those tracks — not to mention the inspiring carpe diem of “Let Go” and the snotty, breakneck punk of album closer “Die Tonight” — filling arenas. Indeed, they come off as ready-built for captivating that kind of audience. 

“All of us were f*cked when we went into the studio,” Gordon admits. “We’d come out of a year of touring, a year of writing, a year of working really hard to make it work, financially. We were all broken, but going in there and being in that environment and having good people around us gave us the energy to push through. I look at all my friends who are getting married, settling down and having kids. I’m not ready for the picket fence just yet. This record’s about challenging normality and making your own future, because you want a different life to everyone else. You miss a lot doing this — weddings, birthdays, anniversaries — so it’s this immense personal sacrifice, but it’s absolutely worthwhile.”

This album is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, proof of that.

Photo Credit: Nicole Mago