Knats sign to Fontana, reveal new release date for Geordie Greep-produced album

The nine-track album – originally due on 6 March via via Gearbox Records – will now come out on 1 May, and the band has shared its second single, "Never Gonna Be A Boxer". The track takes inspiration from toxic masculinity in working class areas, with the band describing it as a tongue-in-cheek story about "a young lad who's been scrapping on the estate and boxing in the gym. Everyone around him does the same and he feels like he should; when really, it's not in his nature."

A Great Day In Newcastle features dozens of musicians playing various brass, woodwind, and string instruments, including Greep himself on electric gutar, It follows the band's debut LP and arrives during a UK headline tour. It will be their first release on Fontana, UK home of AURORA, Jacob Collier, Jon Batiste, and Madison Cunningham.

Led by bassist Stan Woodward, drummer King David-Ike Elechi, and trumpeter Ferg Kilsby - three lifelong friends from Newcastle - Knats have spent the past year touring as the live band for both Greep and Eddie Chacon, including two sold-out nights at London's Koko. Their debut earned them a nomination for Best Breakthrough Artist at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards.

The new record, whose artwork echoes Art Kane's 1958 Harlem photograph, aims to document working class experience in the North East. Topics include fighting culture, crime, life after prison, alcoholism, and the mining industry, with the closing track drawing from a BBC interview with Durham miners from the 1960s. Poet Cooper Robson contributes lyrics throughout.

Speaking on the LP, Woodward says: "This album has been a few years of thought and writing in the making. In terms of how could we make a record as a love letter to our hometown, whilst still talking about some of problems working class people in the North East face, without seeming too self-pitiful. When Cooper Robson got involved, everything changed."

The title references a well-known 1958 portrait of jazz musicians in Harlem, substituting Newcastle as the setting. The band describe the record as "an exploration through happy, sad and angry stories from Newcastle and the beginning of a new sound for Knats."