Harry Stafford, founder of Mancunian gothic-noise band Inca Babies, and American guitarist Marco Butcher are back with Time Always Knows, their first new music together in three years. It previews a third album, Skyscraper Superhighway, due on Black Lagoon Records in January 2027.
The two of them have been working this way since lockdown in 2020 – Stafford in Manchester, Butcher at his Boombox Studio in North Carolina, with files and rough mixes passed back and forth between them. Time Always Knows is a fading-romance song built on John Barry and Morricone-style guitars, with Butcher adding backwards guitar "to add to the despair". The video, filmed by Stafford himself on a cold October night in the Didsbury part of Manchester, is out now alongside the single.
Inca Babies have been knocking around the edges of UK post-punk since the 1980s, so it's good to see Stafford still finding new people to make records with more than three decades on – and a Manchester-to-North-Carolina writing partnership is an unusual way to build a noir record, which is exactly why it's getting a mention here.
Stafford has released ten albums with Inca Babies and worked along the way with The Membranes, Inspiral Carpets' Clint Boon and Public Image Ltd's Keith Levene. Butcher's own back catalogue runs through The Jazz Messengers and Kurt Wolf of Pussy Galore, across jazz, blues and electro darkwave – not the obvious other half of a Manchester gothic voice, but it works.
Skyscraper Superhighway is their third album together, after We Are The Perilous Men (2023) and Bone Architecture (2021), and the twelve songs on it move between Time Always Knows' noir soundtrack feel and the more electronic title track, Skyscraper Superhighway.
Time Always Knows is out now on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp. Skyscraper Superhighway follows on CD and digitally on 15 January 2027.