Temples release their upcoming studio album ‘BLISS’
Re-shaping their perception, Kettering 4-piece Temples today make their emphatic return with brand new studio album ‘BLISS’ - out now - and one that flies in new electronic directions, while staying true to their core DNA, making it their most adventurous and liberated record to date.
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“This song blurs genres and the line between what’s a synth and what’s a guitar/bass, using home made fuzz pedals and odd studio gear to create anything but conservative sounds. We’re always striving to make a bold sonic statement.
The album marks an exciting new chapter following 2023’s Exotico, and sees the band - James Bagshaw (vocals/guitar), Thomas Walmsley (bass), Adam Smith (keys/guitar) & Rens Ottink (drums) - reimagine their psych-rock roots through the prism of late ’90s and early 2000s dance music, drawing on the euphoric melancholy of the Ibiza scene and European electronica while staying true to the band’s core DNA. Influenced by the emotional pull of artists like Faithless, Underworld, Massive Attack and Portishead, BLISS taps into what Temples describe as “melancholic euphoria” - simple structures giving rise to complex feeling. Where on Exotico, the band worked with guest producer Sean Ono Lennon, this time it felt like BLISS could only be produced by Temples themselves, embracing a more instinctive, hands-on approach.
Working together in the same room, they leaned into improvisation and experimentation, using samplers not to rework other artists’ material, but to manipulate and reassemble their own songs into a shared sonic palette. The result is an album that feels collage-like and interconnected, with motifs and textures flowing across tracks. Across BLISS, tracks explore themes of disconnection, frustration, surrender and renewal. As well as ‘Jet Stream Heart’, there is the dazzling dart of ‘Vendetta’, which perfectly marries scuzzy riffs with lasering synths and a bubbling dance melody. ‘Blue Flame’ arrives slower, steadier and packed with a gently fizzing chorus that tackles disconnection at its core and the growing divide between each other. ‘Revelations’ nods to the Gregorian chant that was commonly deployed in late ‘90s and early ‘00s European dance music with its own take, and then there is the crunching stomp of ‘Megalith’, that deals with frustrations. “It’s about finding your inner stillness, but then having found that stillness, maybe it’s not so pleasant,” says keyboardist & guitarist Adam Smith. “You can sometimes feel helpless and stuck when the world is moving around you, and you feel like a standing stone – like a megalith – and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
For Temples, BLISS is more than just a stylistic shift - it’s a statement of intent. A record made without compromise, driven by instinct, chemistry and the joy of making music together again. As the band put it, “it’s about permission: to let go, to move, and to become something unexpected.”
