After 37 years of making music together, Teenage Fanclub aren’t particularly interested in predicting what comes next. For singer-songwriters and guitarists Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, the band’s 13th album, Do Not Dare To Dream, out October 9 via Merge Records, is rooted instead in where they are now: older, reflective, and still finding reasons for optimism in a world that doesn’t always encourage it.

Zooming from their respective homes on a Thursday afternoon, Blake describes the songs as “reflections on how we see the world, from our perspective and people our age. We’ve been around for a long time.” McGinley adds that after talking about making another record, the band finally took the plunge and began “finally mining something out of ourselves … The only resources we have are ourselves and the way that we see things and the world.”

That perspective runs throughout Do Not Dare To Dream, an album filled with bright, infectious melodies that often contrast with the uncertainty surrounding them. “Tomorrow People” considers the people you hope will exist in the future, while lead single “There Was You” similarly confronts a fraught world without surrendering to despair.

The album’s title reflects that tension. Rather than embracing the motivational maxim “dare to dream,” Blake sees a certain absurdity in its easy optimism. “’Dare to dream’ is a very optimistic thing to say. Sometimes things are more difficult than that, so more than poking fun at that meme, “dare to dream” means that things may not be as easy as you thought, so that’s what that meant.”

For McGinley, acknowledging those difficulties doesn’t mean giving in to them. “We can still be cheerful and optimistic in the face of things not being great, you know? My parents’ generation lived in Glasgow when there were bombs falling out of the sky. And here we are, however many years later. Things change.”

Formed in Glasgow in 1989 by Blake and McGinley following the breakup of The Boy Hairdressers, Teenage Fanclub emerged from the city’s C86 scene with the chaotic A Catholic Education in 1990. Across records including Thirteen, Grand Prix, Howdy, Shadows, Here, Endless Arcade, and 2023’s Nothing Lasts Forever, the band have gradually traded youthful noise for increasingly reflective songwriting without losing their melodic core.

For Blake, the new songs also arrive from a better place after several more melancholy years.

“Like everyone else on this planet, there are things in life that aren’t so good. Songwriting is a good way to analyze your thoughts and is a reflection of the way that we look at things. For me, there has been melancholy in the last few years, and I’m really trying to represent my journey through that experience. It can be quite a cathartic experience.”

That reflection unfolded at Black Bay Studio on Great Bernera, a remote island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Teenage Fanclub like to record each album somewhere new, allowing the surroundings to become part of the process, and Great Bernera—with its crashing sea and ancient ruins—offered perhaps their most isolated setting yet.

The location also suited a band that still approaches making records without assuming there will necessarily be another one. “Whenever we do something new, we try to approach it from a perspective of ‘OK, maybe we don’t finish the record because we don’t feel good about it’ or other people decide that we’ve had enough time in this industry. So far, we kept going. Thirty-seven years ago, we said, ‘Let’s just make an album. and see what happens. We didn’t think of anything after that. We’re still kind of the same way. We’ve never been disappointed because we have high expectations. We just accept what happens.”

For Blake, finishing something they believe in is itself the measure of success. “Success happens at the point of creation, when you make the record, when you’re pleased with it. We’re happy with this record; OK, we’re done. Then if something happens after that, that’s great, but that’s enough. You only try to satisfy yourself before anyone has even heard it.’

That attitude extends to the band’s collaborative songwriting. With multiple writers rather than a single person dictating the group’s direction, McGinley says Teenage Fanclub simply “go in whatever direction everyone collectively wants to go in … Historically, in the band, there’s always been different songwriters, so it’s not like there’s one visionary in the band who’s going to say the direction that we travel in. There’s always been a randomness to how different people feel, and you have to go with the collective mood on something. We like that part of it.”

After nearly four decades, Blake and McGinley remain grateful that making a record still leads to touring it—and that anyone is still waiting to hear what Teenage Fanclub does next. “We feel really privileged in a way because we’ve been doing this for a long time. Touring is still great fun. We just enjoy doing what we do. We’re lucky to do what we do, and it’s great because the fact that people are still interested in any way is great.”

Ultimately, they aren’t interested in dictating what listeners should take from Do Not Dare To Dream. “It’s for each individual to take what they want from it. Hopefully, I would like for people to see honesty and integrity in the music and see a lack of contrivance. What we do isn’t contrived. We try to create something, and we don’t have any preconceived notions of what that’s going to be before we do it. We just get together and make something,” Blake says.

For McGinley, the purpose is even simpler. “The thing you get from art is making you feel better about being alive and to feel like you’re more connected to a sensory experience of your own life. It’s about making you feel better about your own existence and taking you out of whatever stressors you have.”

Do Not Dare To Dream is out now. Get it here. 

Photo courtesy of Teenage Fanclub