Soft Play released their excellent new record Heavy Jelly this week but there might not have been another album without the unwitting intervention of Damon Albarn. The punk duo from Kent previously released three albums under their original name of Slaves before switching monikers in 2022, claiming that their old handle didn’t “represent who we are as people or what our music stands for any longer… We want to sincerely apologise to anyone we’ve offended.” But before that name-change, Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent had drifted away from each other, working on solo projects and putting their own group on ice. It took an enquiry from Blur, Vincent recently told The New Cue, to bring them back together.
"Just before Christmas in 2022, before Blur announced they were headlining Wembley Stadium, they asked about our availability,” Vincent said. “We were inactive at that point. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, that is too good an opportunity to pass up’, so I discussed it with Isaac. ‘Maybe we should do this’. But I had a pretty strong contingent that if we started again, it had to be consistent with how we want to go forward. I knew from the years off we had taken that I wanted to change the name anyway so we had some really challenging conversations back and forth, and we couldn’t quite get it together.”
