Eight songs on madness in its various forms: populism, AI dependency, unrequited love and a 1939 short story

Nick Carlisle’s fourth solo album arrives with a title borrowed from science fiction. The Mad Decades, out 29 May 2026 on The Colour Inverted Records, takes its name from a 1939 Isaac Asimov short story, “Trends”, in which a society left behind by scientific progress retreats into superstition and religious fundamentalism. The coincidence that the story was written in his mother’s birth year, and narrated from the 2000s looking back at a fictional 1973 the year Carlisle himself was born, was apparently not lost on him.

Title: The Mad Decades
Artist: Nick Carlisle
Release Date: 2026-05-29
Genres: Psychedelic Rock
Label: Bamboo, Bloody Saturnalia, Häxan, Hilversum, Jester Quantised, Lean Logic, Nick Carlisle, Peepholes, Sailors On The Roiling Sea, The Colour Inverted Records, The Mad Decades, Three Studies Of A Half Human
Description: Nick Carlisle's The Mad Decades out 29 May 2026 on The Colour Inverted Records. Three singles out now, including folk horror video for "Jester Quantised".

Featured image: © Aubrey Simpson

The album has been preceded by three singles. “Hilversum (Single Edit)” came out 18 March 2026, built around a drum machine provided by Alex Ball, a YouTube documentary maker specialising in vintage synthesizers, with Marcus Hamblett (Bears Den, Rozi Plain) on bass. Its subject is the collapse of self-assurance: a protagonist on a train out of Hilversum, questioning whether their sense of self was ever as solid as they imagined. Carlisle has not been to Hilversum. He places the song somewhere between the euphoria of ABBA’s layered piano arrangements and the motorik drive of NEU! and Harmonia.

The second single, “Jester Quantised”, follows on 27 May 2026, two days before the album. Its subject is the distance between the intellectual ambitions of songwriters active in the late 1960s and 1970s and the current expectation that musicians maintain social media channels and address their audiences directly, informally, and often: the artist on a pedestal reduced to soliciting attention from the crowd below. The accompanying video, shot by Aubrey Simpson, takes a folk horror approach: Carlisle plays the outcast Jester, pursued across the South Downs by two medieval townsfolk played by artist, DJ and musician Heidi Heelz and bassist Joe Davin, who catch up with him, push and pull him, rub his face in the dirt, and pelt him with fruit and vegetables. Aubrey Simpson (Pale Blue Eyes) also plays fretless bass on the track and is responsible for the album cover photography.

A third single, “Three Studies Of A Half Human”, is the album opener. The song was written after watching a 1960s documentary on painter Francis Bacon, whose studio existed in a state of extreme physical accumulation; the contrast with an era in which AI can generate visual art with the human creator largely absent from the process is the song’s underlying subject. The track also features the EMS VCS3 synthesizer associated with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, recorded during a session at The Townshend Studio in London, where the instrument currently resides.

Much of the album was recorded at Church Road Recording Company in East Sussex during 2025. Carlisle produced it himself and plays keyboards, occasional guitar, percussion and lead vocals throughout. A recurring preoccupation in his solo work has been the use of physical instruments over software substitutes: The Mad Decades features Hammond C3, Mellotron, harpsichord and a piano once owned by Keith Emerson. “Fire Without Heat” is set in an underground detention facility in the near future, its population kept out of sight.

Carlisle (read our interview with Nick Carlisle) has been a fixture of the UK DIY scene since 2006, via Peepholes (Upset The Rhythm Records), Bamboo (Upset The Rhythm), Katy and Nick (Gob Nation) and Lean Logic (O Genesis Recordings). His first solo release, Häxan: A Soundtrack (2022), was commissioned to accompany the 1922 film as part of the BFI In Dreams Are Monsters season; he performed it live at multiple venues including two nights at the Barbican in London in January 2024. Bloody Saturnalia (2023) was his first album of original songs; Sailors On The Roiling Sea followed in November 2024, also on The Colour Inverted Records.

Further contributors to The Mad Decades include Julian Tardo and Joe Davin (both Insides), Marcus Hamblett (Bears Den, Rozi Plain), Andy Pyne and Simon Adams on drums and percussion, Alex Ball on drum machine and guitar, and German artist Anna River on backing vocals.

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