The Shires return with 'Bonfire,' their first album of new songs in four years

The Shires put out Bonfire on July 3, their sixth studio album and the first set of new songs Ben Earle and Crissie Rhodes have released in four years.

The gap was a choice. After 2022's 10 Year Plan, the duo pulled back to deal with life offstage. Rhodes gave birth to twin daughters that autumn, and both halves of the band spent the stretch since raising families rather than chasing a follow-up. Bonfire is what they came back with, and the first thing to know about it is how little it sweats.

"This is easily the most instinctive album we've ever made," Earle said when the record was announced. "Out went overthinking, multiple takes and layers of production. If it was fun, we went with it."

You can hear that logic all over lead single "Getaway Car." It runs on a punchy kick drum, a couple of bright acoustic guitars, and the close two-part harmony that has always been the duo's calling card, then hands the whole thing to a chorus built to be shouted back across a festival field. Rhodes describes the song as being "about that one person who can take the wheel when life gets hard to navigate." It is a small idea played big, and it does not pretend to be anything else.

Context helps explain why a British country duo returning with a feel-good record is worth paying attention to at all. When the Shires broke through in 2015, they proved something the UK industry had assumed was impossible. Their debut, Brave, became the first album by a British country act to crack the UK Top Ten. Its follow-up, My Universe, arrived as the fastest-selling British country album on record, and the pair went on to become the only British act to take home a Country Music Association award. The current wave of homegrown country singers filling UK theatres is walking through a door the Shires pried open.

Bonfire keeps to the register those wins were built on. The twelve tracks carry titles like "Bonfire Song," "Slow Dance," "One For the Whiskey" and "Sing You Back," and the words alone tell you the mood: warmth, escape, the people you hold onto. This is comfort music, made on purpose, by a band that knows exactly what its audience shows up for.

The bet is not risk-free. An album that sets out to be fun and instinctive can slide into slight, and a duo whose strength is craft and harmony can coast a long way on charm before anyone complains. The real question across these twelve songs is whether there is a ballad here with the staying power of the ones that made their name, or whether "Getaway Car" is the whole pitch repeated in different keys. On first listen the singles land, and the album asks to be taken at face value.

They are not sitting still to find out. The Shires warmed up by supporting Garth Brooks at BST Hyde Park on June 27, and they open a full-band UK headline tour on November 3 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, working through Manchester, Birmingham, the London Palladium and Brighton before closing at Bristol Beacon on November 20, with Kaylee Bell along for the run. For a band that made its name in rooms exactly that size, a set of songs written to be sung back looks less like a coincidence and more like the plan.