Legendary British band Squeeze releases an album written more than 50 years ago
The British band Squeeze has presented a new single and music video, “Why Don’t You”, released alongside the album Trixies — one of the most unusual projects in the group’s history. The uniqueness of the release lies in the fact that the songs were written back in 1974, when the band’s future leaders, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, had just begun writing music together and could hardly have imagined that a few years later they would become one of the most important songwriting duos on the British pop-rock scene.
Today that material has finally received a full studio life. The album Trixies, officially released on March 6, 2026, became the band’s sixteenth studio record and their first release in more than eight years following The Knowledge (2017).
The story of this recording began more than half a century ago. In the early 1970s Difford and Tilbrook met in South London and almost immediately began writing songs together. At the time they were only 19 and 16 years old, yet their ambitions already went far beyond ordinary rehearsal sessions. The musicians conceived a concept album whose story unfolds in a fictional nightclub called Trixies.
All the songs were imagined as short musical stories about the club’s visitors — from mysterious dancers to characters with criminal pasts. The atmosphere of the future record was influenced by the rock operas and theatrical musical projects popular at the time, while Difford’s lyrics were partly inspired by the works of American writer Damon Runyon, known for his stories about New York’s underground world.
Despite the ambitious concept, the project was never realized in the 1970s. The young musicians recorded the songs only as demo tapes and never released them officially, largely because they lacked both experience and the resources needed for a proper recording. Soon their career took another direction: within a few years Squeeze began releasing albums and quickly established themselves on the British music scene.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the band gained wide recognition with songs such as “Cool for Cats”, “Up the Junction”, “Tempted”, and “Another Nail in My Heart”, while the Difford–Tilbrook partnership was often compared with classic songwriting duos in British pop music. Meanwhile, the early demo recordings of the Trixies project remained largely forgotten for many years.
The idea of returning to that material emerged only decades later. The original cassette with the early recordings was rediscovered, and the band decided to finally complete the project that could effectively have been their very first album. The modern version of the record was recorded with the band’s current lineup and production, while keeping the original songs largely unchanged.
According to the musicians, working on the album Trixies became both a nostalgic and emotional experience. They admit that after half a century they were able to look at their teenage ideas from a completely different perspective — now with the experience needed to realize the scale they once imagined.
As a result, the new Squeeze album of 2026 has become a bridge between the band’s past and present. Songs written by teenagers in the early 1970s have finally received a full-fledged release more than fifty years later, allowing listeners to hear what the very beginning of Squeeze might have sounded like — long before their famous hits and international recognition.
