Indie Rock Icons The Cribs Reflect on 20 Years with New Music

Indie darlings The Cribs close out the season with Summer Seizures—a track that feels like a sun-faded Polaroid of late nights and restless energy. Driven by the clean shimmer of a Fender Strat and tight drum accents, the song carries a nostalgic indie-rock warmth, yet pulses with a raw edge that fans of early 2000s alternative will love. It’s equal parts jangly groove and bittersweet send-off—a perfect soundtrack for the last golden days of summer. Indie X Mainstream

The Cribs return today with the announcement of their first new album in five years. Selling A Vibe will be released on January 9 via Play It Again Sam. Also revealed today is the album’s lead single, “Summer Seizures”, which arrives with a video and lands ahead of the band’s first North American dates in eight years.

For the three Jarman brothers, The Cribs has always been a heart-on-sleeve endeavor, documenting a realness and honesty, imbued with a raw spirit and a love for pop melodies, that winks with a healthy skepticism at a world increasingly weighed down by quantity over quality, style over substance. You need only look as far as the new album title for evidence of that. It can be argued though that with Selling A Vibe, that honesty is increasingly turned in the direction of each other, the first time they have so openly done so on one of their records.

With a feeling in the camp that the band were getting stuck on the release-tour-release-tour treadmill, and with the brothers living apart across three timezones, they knew they needed to revive the essence of their relationship as family, and get away from solely feeling like band members. A summer spent together with no music, no writing, just reconnection proved the perfect place to start that process, something they say they’re grateful for the opportunity to do after 20 years together making music.