In an interview with The Independent released today, former frontman of The Maccabees Orlando Weeks has reflected on the reasoning behind the band’s split in 2017. At the height of their artistic and commercial powers, the band broke apart at the top of their game, even holding the coveted headline slot at Latitude Festival. But Weeks maintains “it was what we needed to do.”

Proposing that the artistic process had “just run out of steam a bit,” Weeks reviews the band’s successes up to that point and questions whether there was any further to go. “It felt like we’d made such good strides with ‘Given to the Wild’,” he says, appraising the band’s third album, “and that maybe we had not moved on as far again with ‘Marks to Prove It’, and we’d been doing it for a very, very, very long time.”

Deflecting the question posed to him by interviewer Mark Beaumont if it was his idea for the band to split, Weeks said, “It was everyone knowing that that was what was going to happen. We’d had a difficult time making that final record and we’d reached the end of the line.”

Meanwhile, moving forward, Weeks’s debut solo album A Quickening is set for release in just two days’ time (June 12th). An impending release he again promoted today with a tweet on his official Twitter page, @OrlandoWeeks, this Friday also marks the singer’s upcoming live session for record label Banquet Records. Broadcasting at 19:30 GMT, he’ll be “singing a bunch of songs” from the new album.

Very pleased to announce on Friday you can view a session I’m doing for @BanquetRecords. I’ll be singing a bunch of songs from ‘A Quickening’. For those who would like to join me, you can find more details here https://t.co/9mc9ioBHPF pic.twitter.com/Mk0S8ogPjR

— Orlando Weeks (@OrlandoWeeks) June 10, 2020

The album’s earlier single “Milk Breath” had dropped in mid-May of this year, a song inspired by the birth of his son and the experience of watching him sleep. As he beautifully put it at the time, quoted in an NME article covering the new track, “When you’ve rocked him for 45 minutes and finally the wriggling has stopped and the muscles have relaxed and you put him down in slow motion and then stand, without breathing for another 20 minutes praying that he’s asleep.”

An absolute delight. That and more to look forward to, then.