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“The Last Time”
The first stop of a reverse reflection on the music of Saint Etienne is 2025’s International, their latest—and last ever—album as a band.
After more than three decades as masters of mellifluous, sometimes moody electro-retro-pop, Saint Etienne have released their thirteenth—and final—album, International. Upon hearing the news of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs’s retirement, media reports suggested Saint Etienne is “calling it quits” or “calling it a day,” but the band is a tad less definitive in their press release.
“The group aren’t splitting up as such,” the release says, “they still remain the best of friends after 35 years recording together—but they don’t feel like they want to go on forever and wanted to go out with a bang.” That same statement also teased that International’s closing track, aptly titled “The Last Time,”✦ is a “goodbye to their fans, on record, for the very ‘Last Time.’” Whatever Saint Etienne are suggesting (or not suggesting) through language like “aren’t splitting up as such” and saying “goodbye to their fans, on record,” they have stated clearly that International is their adieu; the final flight (if you will) for what I’m lovingly calling Air Etienne in this series. And that makes me sad.
It makes Cracknell sad, too. In a recent issue of Electronic Sound, where the band sat down to recap their thirty-year-plus career, Cracknell discussed the aforementioned final track, saying, “I can’t listen to [“The Last Time”]. I cry every time I hear it.” The interviewer admits to shedding a tear at “The Last Time,” too, and singles out “Fade” as a song that made him well up, as well. So it goes without saying that I, an old softie who is prone to crying at the drop of a bass, was totally anticipating the waterworks to turn on from the very first notes of “The Last Time.” I was expecting International to be an emotionally charged journey the whole way through, in much the same way hearing Strangeways, Here We Come after the Smiths break-up stabbed you in the solar plexus.
But I didn’t. There were no tears the first time, the fifth time, or the fifteenth time listening to International. And that’s okay. Saint Etienne does not owe me catharsis. Their records have never come with a 100% guarantee of transcendence and salvation, and I think that most objective fans (even Winona Ryder) will agree that the band has not always delivered at that level throughout their discography.
What Saint Etienne has consistently excelled at is the art of album-making—bringing together a collection of songs that hang together like a carefully curated gallery of still images, water colours, and abstract canvases that communicate with each other in seemingly supernatural ways. Dance music as a genre has often been criticized for making banger singles but stale long players. Somewhere along the way (and quite early on, I might add), Saint Etienne discovered the formula for making superlative album-length statements: each release must look to the past, live in the present, and lean to the future.
I didn’t quite hear the formula at work in my initial listens to International. While it’s far from a whimper, it wasn’t giving the full-album emotional wallop I was anticipating. It feels more closely aligned with their highly revered compilation albums (one of which, Continental, has ascended to official album release status); I was expecting International to be a banger of an album, but it played more like a collection of songs at varying degrees of bangerness (look at me out here evolving the language).
It does start with a bang (that’s the last time I use that word in the post, I promise): “Glad”✦ is an all-out ode to joy even on the bleakest of days. You could say its sunny optimism is chemically induced thanks to the contributions of Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands. The song also features Doves’ Jez Williams on guitar, which somehow adds to the cheery camaraderie pouring forth from its infectious positivity. Not that Saint Etienne couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with a song like “Glad” on their own, but the collaboration brings together Saint Etienne’s two pop worlds—indie and dance—on a song that essentially instructs fans not to be sad that Saint Etienne is over, but to revel in the fact that their music will go on eternally. Who could have a heavy heart listening to a melody so light and airy?
“Dancing Heart” treads similar themes while imploring you to dance away your troubles. “Now it’s time to live and move to the rhythm of heartbreak,” Cracknell sings in the most soothing of tones, her voice noticeably more reserved and more resonant than we’ve ever heard. She tells us, “Moments like these / They don’t last forever, turn them to memories,” encouraging us to keep dancing “‘til the morning comes.”
“Glad” and “Dancing Heart” are not the only songs on International to acknowledge that this is the last music we’ll ever hear from Saint Etienne, but they are the two that are most explicitly set in the present. Lest we miss the message embedded in “Glad,” they reinforce the finality of it all by aiming the disco ball’s refracted lights right into our eyes.
“The Go Betweens” features guest vocals from Nick Heyward, one-time member of 80s new wave band Haircut One Hundred and an accomplished solo artist in his own right. Better known in the UK as a pop icon, Heyward’s involvement probably won’t register with anyone under 50, but it clearly delights Saint Etienne: “[Heyward’s] one of my secret old crushes,” Cracknell admits in the Electronic Sound interview, and his harmonies feel like a knowing nod back, as if he’s equally as charmed. The song’s title and arrangement tip their bowler hats to the Australian band the Go-Betweens, early purveyors of indie jangle pop who helped shape the musical sensibilities of artists like Saint Etienne, who grew up studying the credits on 45s, watching Top of the Pops appearances, and tracking the UK charts. It’s a reminder that Stanley, the band’s resident pop historian, literally wrote the book on this stuff with Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (2013), a chronological yet approachable survey of pop music from the 1950s onward.
I hear echoes of 2005’s Tales from Turnpike House on “The Go Betweens,” specifically the song “A Good Thing.” There’s no specific reference point that connects it to their seventh album; instead, it’s as if Saint Etienne are making a subtle callback to that particular project. There’s a similar familiarity to “Take Me to the Pilot,”✦ on which I hear the angular synths of 2002’s Finisterre, as well as the swelling rush of early '90s EDM via Paul Hartnoll of Orbital. Both “Sweet Melodies”✦ and “Why Are You Calling?” carry some of the ambient and amorphous textures of Sound of Water (2000). “Fade” has shades of their modern take on traditional folk from 1994’s Tiger Bay, and “He’s Gone” essentially gets its name from the hook off that album’s excellent single, “Like a Motorway.”
But perhaps the song that most clearly connects to the band’s past is “Brand New Me,” a collaboration co-written with Confidence Man’s Janet Planet, Reggie Goodchild and Sugar Bones. It’s a song about closing a chapter in one’s life, shedding old skin and starting over anew. To me, it has a striking similarity in tone and style to “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” the band’s third-ever single from 1991, and the first time Cracknell sang vocals with Saint Etienne.
“Brand New Me” may have some fans feeling the warm and fuzzy glow of Foxbase Alpha’s nostalgic charm, but it’s my least favourite track on International, and, along with “Save it For a Rainy Day,” the one I’m most likely to skip. The opposite is true of “Two Lovers,”✦ co-written by Wiggs and the legendary Vince Clarke (Erasure, Yaz, Depeche Mode), who adds engineering and programming support to the track as well. Sleek, stylish, and highly sophisticated, it feels like a future-forward reimagining of their hit, “He’s On the Phone.” Of all the collaborators on International, Clarke brings Saint Etienne the freshest sound and feel. Sadly, like the song’s ill-fated paramours, it’s a fleeting sense of what could have been: “We were two lovers / Whose future was fantasy.”
And there it is, the last variable of the formula falling into place. It’s a glimpse of an unlikely future, an unsentimental nod to the past, and an unapologetic acknowledgement of the present. In the end, International lands right where Saint Etienne intended. They resist melodrama, even in the face of finality, and that feels fitting for a band whose best work has always been measured, wry, and quietly confident. I was expecting Saint Etienne to go straight for the heart, when I should have known the route they take has always been through the head. They leave us thinking rather than weeping, and break your heart in the way that only Saint Etienne can.
The cheeky devils.
