Records often take shape as much through exclusion as inclusion. When Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn assembled the running order for their thirteenth studio album, The Demise Of Planet X, plenty of material wound up left on the cutting room floor purely because it pulled in different directions from the main narrative. With the arrival of a new expanded edition, the Nottingham duo have retrieved nine unreleased tracks from those sessions, providing a much clearer view of what was happening behind the scenes while the album came together.
The original LP carried considerable weight on its release, climbing to Number Six in the UK charts. Fearn stepped into co-production across the record, stretching out the musical canvas while Williamson supplied his characteristically pointed observations. It was also an unusually collaborative outing for the group. Guest contributions ran through the tracklist, bringing in Aldous Harding, Big Special, actor Gwendoline Christie, and former Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins.
Tompkins steps forward again on Cato, the centerpiece of the newly issued archival tracks. The singer had previously appeared on the single No Touch, and her chemistry with the pair worked well enough that Williamson and Fearn later joked about recruiting her into the group permanently. Even so, Cato missed the final cut of the original album because the duo decided its overall mood sat awkwardly against the tone of the surrounding record. Alongside the expanded release, Tompkins has directed an accompanying video for the song. Discussing the track, she highlighted its relentless, infectious rhythm, explaining that trading vocal parts with Williamson against Fearn's driving, throbby production felt like an authentic duet built around a feeling of steadily mounting panic.
Other cuts among the nine bonus tracks shed light on how several finished pieces took form. Listeners get an alternate take of The Good Life, which captures Williamson working through an early lyrical version before Christie recorded her vocals for the finished record. There is also The Return Of The Bin White Dukes, an unused cut that provided the early structural basis for the track that eventually became Don Draper. Elsewhere, Give Em What They Want turns out to be a fast, aggressive punk song that the pair enjoyed immensely, even though they recognized that placing it on the primary tracklist would have disrupted the pacing of the record.
Setting aside finished work is a familiar trap for any recording artist, and Williamson compared the experience of revisiting discarded songs to eating food that has been left to rest overnight. He noted that the exhaustion that comes with working in a studio can cloud an artist's perspective on what actually works. When the two revisited their rougher recordings half a year after stepping away from the project, they discovered that the material was far more resolved than they had remembered, carrying real presence and purpose of its own. Rather than keeping those offshoots private, Williamson felt that releasing them offered a genuine look at how much work was poured into shaping their thirteenth record, showing listeners the trial and error behind the finished article.
The arrival of the expanded collection lands in the middle of a busy touring run. Williamson and Fearn opened their European itinerary last week, with an upcoming date at Les Docks in Lausanne, Switzerland, leading into an autumn stretch that takes in Helsinki, Vilnius, Warsaw, Vienna, Ljubljana, Istanbul, and Athens. Before closing out the year, they will join The Prodigy for an arena appearance in Amsterdam and stop at the Barezzi Festival in Parma, Italy. Their live schedule then remains quiet until spring 2027, when the duo are scheduled to cross the Atlantic for a run of North American dates.
