LP – Standard Edition Black Vinyl (2025 Reissue).
On November 7, 2025, Merge Records reissues The Clientele’s debut album The Violet Hour on their label for the very first time.
Long out of print and highly sought after since its initial 2003 UK issue on Pointy, this LP pressing marks the first time The Violet Hour has been widely available on the format in North America.
Following the breakthrough success of Suburban Light, the 2001 collection
of The Clientele’s initial singles and EPs, tastemakers and aficionados were eager to hear what the trio of Alasdair MacLean (guitars, vocals), Mark Keen (drums, piano), and James Hornsey (bass) could make if set loose inside a studio to record a full-length album.
What they emerged with from London’s Medina Road Studios in the fall of 2002 was tantalising: Their already sharply realised motif of ’60s psychedelia and modern fuzz-pop took on inflections of jazz, particularly in how the space afforded by the LP format allowed for a keener articulation of atmosphere.
The Clientele stretch the early evening of The Violet Hour out infinitely, manipulating the structured time of the pop song the way poets manipulate the structure of language—to capture place, mood, stray thoughts, disappointments, potential, and, above all, longing.
It is a shimmering jewel of a record, its languid melodies and reverb-drenched choruses at once sublime and tragic, its hazy, dreamlike discursions at once recalling the warmth of a favourite record played over a midsummer rainstorm while yearning for the mist-veiled future of a yet unwritten night.
The Violet Hour has endured decades later as a signature album in The Clientele’s catalog, not only perfecting the sound that made the band a message-board phenomenon but revealing entirely new depth to it.
In its wake, it was no longer possible to declare them one of the best-kept secrets in indie pop.
The Clientele were, and remain, one of the genre’s most important figures, and The Violet Hour was, and remains, one of their most vital statements: a lush invitation to their underground.
