Surrender to Hurts

Synth pop aficionados Hurts return with a third studio album, Surrender, on 9 October. The duo have a fine ear for classic pop melodies but this time they have expanded their sound, citing Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and even Motown as influences. “We decided to see how things would turn out if we enjoyed ourselves!” singer Theo Hutchcraft explains. “It was quite a dark time making the last record, and the content was quite refl ective of our state, but once we’d finished it and exorcised the demons our mood shifted quite a lot.” The duo joined forces with Madonna’s Grammy Awardwinning producer Stuart Price and Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim, Vampire Weekend) to sculpt the new opus, and a first taster, Some Kind of Heaven, is available on iTunes now.