MUSIC: Frightened Rabbit to play Dublin as part of new tour

SELKIRK’S finest Frightened Rabbit have announced a winter tour of their album ‘Painting of a Panic Attack’.

Released in April, it hit the Top 20 in the UK album charts before achieving the best critical reception of the band’s career to date.

This, their fifth studio album, saw the addition of The National’s Aaron Dessner on production duties.

The album is much indebted lyrically to Los Angeles, following singer Scott Hutchison’s move from Scotland to the States in 2014.

Taking inspiration from what he saw, Painting is often a love/hate letter to LA.

Alongside the tour dates, which include Dublin in February, the band has also unveiled a raw and beautiful live acoustic version of album closer ‘Die Like A Rich Boy’.

Dessner says of ‘Die Like A Rich Boy’: “The song feels like a completely classic song, but it’s also a distillation of everything Scott has ever written about. It’s so gracefully constructed and realised, and it’s not trying to be anything other than what it is. I wish I could write a song like that.”

The Scottish indie rock band, from Selkirk, formed in 2003. The line-up currently consists of Scott Hutchison (vocals, guitar), Grant Hutchison (drums), Billy Kennedy (guitar, bass), Andy Monaghan (guitar, keyboards), and Simon Liddell (guitar). Since 2004 the band has been based in Glasgow.

Initially a solo project for vocalist and guitarist Scott Hutchison, Frightened Rabbit’s first studio album, ‘Sing the Greys’, was recorded as a duo by Hutchison and his brother Grant, and released on independent label, Hits the Fan, in 2006.

A second studio album, ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ (2008) was released to strongly positive reviews and extensive touring, with guitarist and keyboardist Andy Monaghan joining the band to flesh-out its live performances.

The band’s third studio album, ‘The Winter of Mixed Drinks’, was released in 2010, with former Make Model guitarist Gordon Skene joining the band for its accompanying tour. Frightened Rabbit signed to Atlantic Records later that year, before the release of its fourth studio album, ‘Pedestrian Verse’ in 2013.

Disillusioned from touring, Hutchison, Monaghan, and Liddell recorded a studio album without the band, entitled ‘Owl John’.

Gordon Skene departed from the band in early 2014, and the band recorded its fifth studio album the following year in New York.

Frightened Rabbit are Live At The Academy on Sunday, February 5.