Slowdive Share "Avalyn" Live Recording to Mark 25th Anniversary of Debut EP

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

25 years ago today, Slowdive released their self-titled debut EP on Creation. To mark the occasion, they’ve shared a live version of “Avalyn”, recorded in 2014 during their North American tour. Listen to that above. In a detailed post on the record’s writing and recording process, they also hinted that a live album from the tour was in the works. Read it in full on their Facebook.

Discussing “Avalyn” in the post, they wrote:

So what about “Avalyn”? We didn’t really have a structure for the song until we got to the studio. In fact, it was almost an afterthought. We had the bass part that was simply repeated all the way through, and Neil and Christian found that they could make weird noises with their guitars. One part almost sounds like a wind instrument. Otherwise it was really just composed on the spot, Rachel bringing the words and vocal melody – and we recorded it pretty much live, and possibly in a single take. We knew immediately that together with Slowdive, this was the direction the band was taking. Listening back to Avalyn at that time, we couldn’t really believe that we’d come up with something that sounded like that when a few months earlier we were being talked about as “Reading’s answer to The Primitives”.

Watch Slowdive perform “Golden Hair” at Pitchfork Music Festival 2014:

 

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