NEWPORT Indie pop band The Darling Buds have released their first recordings in 25 years.

Fans of the band, who had chart success in the 1990s with hits Burst, Hit the Ground and Let’s Go Round There, have snapped up all green vinyl editions of the group's four-track EP entitled Evergreen, released through Cardiff based indie label Oddbox Records.

The Darling Buds, which consists of founder members Andrea Lewis Jarvis and Chris McDonagh along with time-served Buds Matt Gray, Paul Chaz Watkins and Erik Stams, have performed several sell out gigs and festivals in recent years. However, there was also a desire within the group to return to the recording studio.

“We all felt creatively we wanted to do something new rather than just getting up on stage and performing the back catalogue all the time,” Andrea explained to Andy Howells, “As much as that’s good fun and I’ve really enjoyed doing it, you do think, I wish we had some new material.”

Last autumn the Darling Buds set about putting together their new EP.

Andrea continues: “It came from us to start writing new stuff. It all happened quite organically. Evergreen and Complicated were both written over the last 18 months and were songs that we’d started playing live so we knew that we liked them. There’s a third song called Guess the Good Parts and about a year ago, Matt sent me an email with a version of this song on it. My initial thoughts were 'what band is this?' and then within seconds I realised it was a demo from us from around 25 years ago.

“Matt was in the band when we broke up all those years ago and it was co-written with Matt which is probably the reason why he kept it, so that’s quite a nice little link to the past which has been rerecorded.

“There’s also a slower song called Twenty-One Aches, just to give it a different feel because you don’t want four songs all at the same tempo and we wanted to go for a different feel on the EP.”

Initial response to the EP along with the video for Evergreen has been positive with comparisons made to older Darling Buds material as well as taking the band forward musically.

"We did want to sound like The Darling Buds, that was the intention,” explains Andrea, “but you also wonder if this lives up to the other stuff or if it can stand alongside it and from the feedback that we’ve got it’s been a real thumb’s up all the way.”

Despite their busy lives “we all have day jobs too,” laughs Andrea, the band will be playing a few gigs in the summer including a music festival in Spain and a homecoming appearance at Newport’s Le Pub on June 24. “It’s always nice to play locally and say here’s some new material," says Andrea.

Tickets for The Darling Buds with support from Bedford Falls at Le Pub, Newport, on June 24 are available from eventbrite.co.uk while the Evergreen EP on several formats including vinyl and download, is available now from oddboxrecords.bandcamp.com/album/evergreen-ep