In their 43-year career, Primal Scream have shown many musical faces. As one of the most influential Scottish indie pop acts of the 1980s, the band around singer Bobby Gillespie was always looking for new musical directions. They increasingly added influences from psychedelic rock and garage rock to their sound and brought their music into the mainstream with dance music influences on their hit album "Screamadelica" in 1991. The album, along with the hit single "Movin' On Up" and the song "Loaded", became their biggest success and was voted number 1 of the "50 Druggiest Albums Ever" by the New Musical Express in 2011, alluding to the band's psychedelic and wacky sound. In the following years, the band experimented with blues, folk, trip-hop and industrial rock influences and released their twelfth studio album "Come Ahead" in November 2024, eight years after the release of their last album "Chaosmosis". Primal Scream will be coming to Cologne and Berlin in June 2025.
founded in 1982 by singer Bobby Gillespie and guitarist Jim Beattie, bassist Robert Young quickly formed the core of the band. However, after the release of the first album in 1987, Beattie left the band and was replaced by Andrew Innes, who became Gillespie's most loyal companion. Several line-up changes shaped the history of Primal Scream. World-class musicians such as My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin Shields (1998-2006), The Stone Roses bassist Gary Mounfield (1996-2011) and keyboardist Martin Duffy (1989-2022), who died in 2022, played an integral role in the band's development. Following the success of "Screamadelica", which entered the top 10 of the UK album charts in 1991 and reached number 8, "Give Out, But Don't Give Up" with the hit song "Rocks" (1994) and the album "Vanishing Point", released in 1997, reached number 2 in the UK charts. XTRMNTR" (2000) and "Riot City Blues" (2006), which includes another hit for the band, "Country Girl", also landed in the Top 5 of the British charts, while "Beautiful Future" entered the Top 10 in 2008. On their latest album "Come Ahead", Primal Scream once again experiment with influences from electronic music, psychedelic rock, funk, modern pop and symphonic aspects. NME described the album as "funk meets punk, with grenades in the trunk" and appreciated the political content of the music and lyrics.