Scottish alt-rock band Teenage Fanclub have recently announced their newest album, Nothing Lasts Forever, a follow-up to their 2021 release Endless Arcade. According to Pitchfork, the album is slated for a release on September 22, 2023, via Merge in the United States and the band’s label PeMa in the United Kingdom and Europe. Alongside the announcement for their upcoming album, the band released a music video for their new single, “Foreign Land,” which will also be featured on their to-be-released album. Watch the official video for “Foreign Land” below.

The new single carries the characteristic rock sound, with guitars, keyboard sounds, light percussion, and electric guitar solos. The song’s lyrics seem to be about a person growing and changing over time. In the past they may have had a tumultuous life, as their “heart was like a stone / But now it’s beating brightly.” The titular line “The past’s a foreign land, I did / my best, you understand” shows that the singer has undergone significant personal growth since a period of their past, enough for it to be completely foreign. The band reinforces this narrative, saying that “These songs are definitely personal. You’re getting older, you’re going into the cupboard getting the black suit out more often. Thoughts of mortality and the idea of the light must have been playing on our minds a lot.”

On the album as a whole, songwriter Raymond McGinley said “We never talk about what we’re going to do before we start making a record.” He continued, “We don’t plan much other than the nuts and bolts of where we’re going to record and when. That thing about light was completely accidental; we didn’t realize that until we’d finished half the songs. The record feels reflective, and I think the more we do this thing, the more we become comfortable with going to that place of melancholy, feeling and expressing those feelings.”