This news item is a kind of hybrid update/apology – a bit of a departure from the norm, and not something that we plan to make a habit of, but in this instance we felt that an apology might not go astray! Before we jump into it, we’d like to stress that the events & mindsets described below take place in the past-tense. We are super-excited about 2012, and we have some great plans, which we’ll get to in a moment.

But first:

We’re Sorry

We sincerely apologise to you all for taking so fucking long to bring you any new music. There are numerous reasons for this – weddings, relocations, babies, job losses and so on – but these are really just excuses for a bit of a deeper problem; somewhere along the way we got lost.

When we wrote the first album, we were finding out who we were as a band. We were excited, motivated and dreamed of doing this band thing full time. It took a while to get that first album out, and by the time it was done we had a better idea of who we were. In fact we’d already started working on new stuff (quite a departure from our original sound). We were itching to jump back into it, and we were confident that the music would flow much faster than it had the first time around.

In hindsight, there may be a certain amount of irony to be found there…

We had a few songs that “worked” almost straight away. The arrangement, melody, lyrics – everything fell into place, we all loved them, so they would go in the “finished” pile, we’d shout “next!” and move on. Other songs started out as fragments – AWESOME fragments, but fragments nonetheless – we just couldn’t seem to agree on how to get them over the line. Unfortunately these songs became the ones which took up 90% of our attention (hey, they’re the ones that needed work) and we kept re-hashing them over and over again, iteration after iteration, until they bore virtually no resemblance to the original ideas, and yet somehow we still didn’t like them.

Then of course our attention turned back to the “finished” songs, and we might have individually started to notice things which we might like to change about them. “Just this one thing, it’ll make it even better”… that way madness lies. Leonardo DaVinci was famously quoted as saying “great art is never finished, only abandoned”, and while we’re not (quite) arrogant enough (except maybe Knotty) to claim to be producing great art, the point rings resoundingly true. Sooner or later you have to call it finished and let go of it.

So: what now? Well, we’ve decided that a shift in perspective is required. We’ve always seen ourselves as an “album band”. All our favourite bands write albums. But it just doesn’t quite make sense to hold back songs – some of which we finished quite a while ago – just for the sake of completing a full CDs worth of material, particularly when downloading music is fast becoming the primary method of distribution.

So here’s the plan

Starting today, the 3rd of March, we’ll release one song on the third of each month through the website, downloadable in your choice of either a 320kb/s MP3, or a 44.1khz lossless FLAC file. The first single will be free (in either format) for the first few days, and from there we’ll start charging reasonable, iTunes-competitive rates for downloads – although of course you’ll still be able to stream each track in full. In the meantime, we will continue working on new material, and we fully intend to release a fantastic T3E album before the end of the year (just in time for Christmas!) Rest assured, we will make sure we look after the real fans, so if you’re buying all the singles, we can promise that you won’t be disadvantaged or ripped off once the physical album lands.

We also have a couple of other release ideas up our sleeve, so all told it should be a pretty good year. We’re excited, and we’re optimistic about the future of The Third Ending – we hope you are too.

Thanks for sticking with us.

Now what are you waiting for?! Go and grab the first single!