Life Without Buildings - Love Trinity
£1.00 - £10.99
Life Without Buildings - Love Trinity
£1.00 - £10.99
PRE-ORDER: SHIPS ON NOV 21ST, 2025
Life Without Buildings were Robert, Chris and Will — a group of mostly Glasgow School of Art students who joined forces in the summer of 1999, with vocalist Sue Tompkins joining a little later in the year. They weren’t active for too long, eventually disbanding in 2002 after the release of their first and final record, Any Other City. Embarking on a tour with Belle and Sebastian and playing countless shows across the country, the band are surprisingly pretty undocumented; a few fuzzy live videos recorded at the now closed Beat Room in Glasgow resurfaced on YouTube a few years ago, but give or take a handful of interviews and a live recording from a show in Sydney (which was finally pressed to vinyl by Rough Trade for Record Store Day 2025), there’s not much out there.
Love Trinity began its life as a one-off. Originally released as a single for Trifekta Records in Australia to promote an upcoming tour for the group, it sort of slipped through the cracks of the core Life Without Buildings discography. There’s a low quality rip on YouTube and a strikingly gorgeous version on Live At The Annandale Hotel, but all things considered, it’s taken 24 years for the studio recording of Love Trinity to really see the light of day. It was the last song the group ever recorded, and perhaps a glimpse into what might’ve been if they’d continued writing together, but you know what they say - the best things go out with a bang. Or, in this case, with the best kind of song: a slow, shimmering builder that creeps into bliss and ends right back where it began - with that signature RDG riff and an abundance of space.
“It’s nice to mark Love Trinity, as a song — it’s always felt like it slipped through the cracks a bit,” says guitarist Robert Dallas Gray. “It was the last song we recorded, one of the last we wrote. We recorded it as a one-off single for Trifekta Records in Australia, to promote the tour we were going to do there. I think it felt quite different from the other stuff; it came out of Chris’s bassline (which a lot of things did), and it had the delay effect on the guitar, and the sort of big guitar solo. There’s even a part where Sue’s vocals are multi-tracked — so whereas all the previous stuff had deliberately been very dry and live sounding, it was more of a sort of atmospheric thing. I don’t think it was anyone’s favourite at the time, but a lot of people we knew loved it and said it was the best thing we’d done. For me it’s taken on more importance over time, because it feels like a swansong, I guess.”
“Where have 24 years gone? I just hope it sounds good and is a nice object to have and hope it captures something about that moment in time when we recorded it.” - Sue Tompkins
A co-release with Heavenly Creature. EHW017 x HCR044: Limited to 500 with a remaster for vinyl by Sam Smith. Full colour original picture sleeve and an etched B-side with handwritten lyrics by Sue Tompkins. Artwork by Hayley Tompkins, sleeve layout by Robert Dallas Gray. Vinyl purchase includes digital download.