BOSTON MANOR have shared a new single ‘Sliding Doors’, their second new song of 2024 and one that rides waves of spiking distortion and cuts rich grooves as it goes. ‘Sliding Doors’ portrays the sometimes seismic impact that the seemingly innocuous actions in our day to day lives can have. It’s a song that in many ways leads right back to the start of Boston Manor.

In a world full of disorder and chaos, all we can do sometimes is respond to what’s laid out in front of us. The results may be unpredictable, glorious or devastating, but as possibility and opportunity present themselves one moment, hide themselves the next, it’s how we react at those junctures that leads us on our ultimate pathway. Expanding, lead vocalist Henry Cox says:

“I’d gone home to visit my parents for the weekend and had taken a bus up to the north shore to go and visit a friend, I was on my way home and the bus basically crashed. It wasn’t bad, no one was hurt or anything but I had to get off. It was super late and buses basically stop running at that time in parts of Blackpool. I had been texting Mike and it turned out the bus had crashed at the bottom of his street, so I just went round to his. We basically ended up writing the first song from our demo that night. We played our first show a few weeks later.

If that car hadn’t pulled out on that bus, we probably never would’ve started Boston Manor & been all the places we’ve been, I wouldn’t have met my wife & half of my friends. I don’t know if I would even be playing music now.”

‘Sliding Doors’ is a way for the band to recognise that as we go through life and make more choices, some versions of ourselves die away, and new versions emerge. Who we become may all be down to the roll of a dice.

“Sliding Doors is named after that movie of the same name. I called it that because when we were writing it I started thinking about all of the decisions that I’ve made that have led me to the life I have and how circumstantial a lot of it is. It got me thinking about how Boston Manor started. I’d had a few conversations with Dan [Cunniff, bass] and Mike [Cunniff, lead guitar] (who I barely knew at the time) about starting a band. But at that time I was in art school in a different city and I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I was also starting like two other bands with different people so I figured it was just something that you talk about.”
– Henry Cox / BOSTON MANOR