New Wave Pioneers Spoons Announce New Album, Nightlife, Led By Single “Take The World”
Spoons have announced Nightlife, their eighth studio album, arriving November 6 on CD, digital download and 180-gram red vinyl, and have released its lead single, “Take the World,” as the first taste of the band’s first fully independent release. For the first time in their four-decade career, every creative decision rests entirely in the band’s own hands.
The story starts in 1980 in Burlington, Ontario, where an intrepid young band would soon turn its own name into a household word. Gord Deppe and Sandy Horne, together with original members Derrick Ross and Rob Preuss, helped define the sound of pop and New Wave in the 1980s with hits including “Nova Heart,” “Romantic Traffic,” “Old Emotions” and “Tell No Lies.” Not bad for a group of kids from Burlington.
Their debut, Stick Figure Neighbourhood, was recorded in 1981 at Grant Avenue Studios in Hamilton with a then unknown engineer named Daniel Lanois, earning rave reviews and the number one slot on college radio. It was the release of “Nova Heart,” produced by John Punter of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry fame, that turned Spoons into a household name, and when MuchMusic launched its very first broadcast, the network opened with the words, “Coming up we have brand new videos by Duran Duran, Howard Jones and the Spoons,” a line that helped launch an entire video driven era of Canadian music.
Arias & Symphonies, recorded at George Martin’s famed AIR Studios in London, solidified the band’s place on the New Wave front and led to the group opening for the Police, Culture Club and Simple Minds. The album would later be named one of the 20 Most Influential Albums of the 80s by The Chart Magazine, and “Nova Heart” was included in Bob Mersereau’s book The Top 100 Canadian Singles of All Time.
In 1983, Ready Records brought in Nile Rodgers, of Chic, David Bowie, Madonna and later Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” to produce the follow-up album Talkback. More radio hits followed in “Romantic Traffic,” “Old Emotions” and “Tell No Lies,” with the “Romantic Traffic” video, shot in the subways of Toronto, standing today as one of the most iconic Canadian music videos ever made. A soundtrack contribution to Ron Mann’s film Listen to the City followed, along with two more studio albums.
Under the guidance of Rush’s manager, Ray Daniels, and with keyboardist Scott MacDonald and drummer Steve Kendry added to the lineup, Spoons recorded ‘Bridges Over Borders’ and ‘Vertigo Tango’ for Anthem Records. The singles “Bridges Over Borders,” “Be Alone Tonight,” “Rodeo,” “When Time Turns Around” and “Waterline” kept the band touring through the end of the decade.
Plenty of people assumed that was the end of the 80s story, and they could not have been more wrong. Spoons’ greatest hits collection, Collectible Spoons, arrived on MCA/Universal Music in 1994 and drove one of the band’s most successful tours ever, as old fans returned and new ones discovered the music for the first time, right as the Retro 80s movement began to take hold.
In 2010, Gord and Sandy, joined by producer and keyboard player Jeff Carter, released ‘Static In Transmission,’ the band’s first collection of new songs in over two decades and a modern spin on the classic Spoons sound. The singles “You Light Up” and “Escape With You” proved the band remained genuinely current, and the Toronto Star’s John Sakamoto included the album in his Anti-Hit List the week it came out.
The years that followed brought a run of milestones befitting a legacy act. In 2012, Sparks Music and Ready Records marked the 30th anniversary of ‘Nova Heart’ with a special EP featuring the original 1982 cut, two remixes including Jeff Carter’s electronic “Singularity Mix,” a rare 1981 demo, and a live recording mixed by John Punter himself at Barrymore’s in Ottawa in 1982. A 30th anniversary edition of Arias & Symphonies followed, complete with extensive liner notes and live tracks, and brought the original lineup back together for the first time in 26 years for a sold-out release party in Toronto. In 2013, Spoons won Music Express Magazine’s Back In The Spotlight Award, released a remastered ‘Stick Figure Neighbourhood’ and a 30th anniversary edition of ‘Talkback,’ and Gord published a book on the band’s history, Spoon Fed, through Manor House Publishing.
Spoons kept building from there. New Day New World arrived in 2019, their first studio album in over eight years, again produced by Jeff Carter and supported by four video singles. A new greatest hits set, ‘Repeatable: 1980-2020,’ followed on CD and double vinyl in 2020, and 2021 brought ‘Echoes,’ a covers collection from artists around the world reimagining their favourite Spoons songs, with proceeds supporting the Unison Fund’s work helping musicians and live music technicians recover from the pandemic’s toll on the industry.
Nightlife picks up that thread and pushes it somewhere new, slipping into a world where the night lives and the truth sits somewhere between the shadows, all set to infectious drum machine beats and relentless synth melodies. It time travels back to the Nova Heart era, four decades on, seen now with new eyes and a new perspective. Tracks including “Take The World,” “Better Late Than Never Did It” and “Doomed” have already become concert favourites well ahead of release.
“Take The World” leads the album as its first single, a song about dreaming, making those dreams real, and pulling them back into reach, even if only for one more night. The record was produced by Jeff Carter and features Gord Deppe on vocals and guitar, Sandy Horne on bass and vocals, keyboards from Scott MacDonald, Jeff Carter and Matthew Deppe, and drums from both of Spoons’ live drummers, Chris McNeil and Tony Ferraro.
The Retro 80s movement is closing in on a decade old at this point, and it shows no sign of slowing down. As far as Sandy, Gord, the rest of the band and plenty of fans are concerned, that is exactly how it should be, and Nightlife stands as proof that four decades in, Spoons remain one of Canada’s genuine New Wave legends, still writing some of the best material of their career.
Hi, Gord! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
The Spoons are a Canadian 80s band that have been around for forty-six years! Wow, that sounds like a long time, but it feels like we’re just getting started! Myself, Gord Deppe, and Sandy Horne are the original founding members, still going strong.
For the first time in your career, ‘Nightlife’ is completely independent. After working with legendary producers and major labels, what did having total creative freedom unlock that you don’t think could have happened 20 or 30 years ago?
Having total creative control is kind of the way we’ve been doing it since the 80s, but this time we’ve taken on the sole responsibility of being the record label. It allowed us to take as much time as we wanted and release this album when we thought it was ready. Jeff Carter produced once again, who did our last two albums, and also produced the video for the first single Take The World. It’s great to do things in house, because we can oversee every step of the process and be represented in the way that we want to be.
When you wrote “Take the World,” were you thinking back to the optimism of the early Spoons years, or were you writing from the perspective of people who’ve lived enough life to know that dreams take work to hold onto?
The song Take The World is totally about the innocence of the early years, but it also jumps forward to this time in our careers when, incredibly, we can recapture even just a small flash of that magic time. The video for that song is really our story, about a bunch of kids starting out in high school and our private little world we created in a music store that I worked at in Burlington, Ontario. It’s the place that we hung out at and rehearsed in. That sentiment goes for us as a band, but also for any person who’s had a dream, made it real and then had the chance to relive it later in their lives. It’s a song for everyone.
A lot of bands spend decades trying to recreate the sound that made them famous. ‘Nightlife’ feels like it acknowledges the past without living in it. How do you honour albums like ‘Arias & Symphonies’ while still making music that feels honest to who you are today?
I think we’ve always had a sound that was a little different than the other bands around us. It didn’t always work to our advantage. We didn’t always try to write songs that were meant for pop radio, but somehow our crazy little creations made it on the airwaves. I think no matter what we do, that sound comes through even now. But, as you say, we’re not stuck in the 80s. I love a lot of new music and I think it would be great if new listeners would think, hey this is a great new band that sounds a little bit 80s! We can’t avoid that. It’s in our DNA.
You’ve gone from hearing Spoons introduced on MuchMusic’s very first broadcast to now releasing your eighth studio album more than 40 years later. When you step onstage today and hear fans singing “Nova Heart” alongside brand-new songs like “Take the World,” what does that tell you about the kind of connection you’ve built with your audience?
The connection we’ve made with our audience over forty-six years means everything to us. Not just creating music and performing it, but also the feedback we get in the stories that we hear after shows and online posts. It makes us feel like we’re part of something bigger. It makes us realize that we’ve done something that means something to people, enough that they don’t want to let it go anymore than we do. We’ve created something pretty amazing between us and our audience. Something that we never want to end.
Upcoming Shows;
October 16, 2026, Maxwell’s, Waterloo, ON, with Rough Trade. Ticket link
December 3, 2026 – Le Studio TD, Montreal, QC – Ticket Link
December 4, 2026 – Bronson Theatre, Ottawa, ON – Ticket Link
December 5, 2026 – The Concert Hall, Toronto, ON – Ticket Link