Maxïmo Park Stream of Life

Maxïmo Park's eighth studio album, Stream Of Life, saw the band link up once again with Ben Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective), Grammy-winning producer of 2021's near-chart-topping, pandemic-era tour de force Nature Always Wins, and as a result it marks the first time they have all been together in a studio to make an album since 2016. Their previous accolades consist of their first two albums going gold in the UK and a nomination for the Mercury Prize. Stream Of Life finds the band in perhaps their most reflective state. Lead singer Paul Smith, this most lit-pop of lyric writers, took the album title from a short story by Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, inspired by both it's stream of consciousness style and the way it prompts reflection on the inner mechanisms of people's minds. It begs the question of why they do the things that they do, even when they can seem counterintuitive to the outsider. There's an inner flow to every individual - a stream of life.