Blossoms frontman Tom Ogden recently sat down with NME to discuss the unusual origins of their upcoming collaborative single with Declan McKenna.

• READ MORE: Blossoms on the “playfulness” of album six as they reflect on 10 years of their debut: “Resting on our laurels was never on the agenda”

The band brought out McKenna at an intimate Manchester gig last week (August 5), with the one-off homecoming show at the Manchester Deaf Institute seeing the indie icons celebrate their breakthrough 2016 album as well as debut playful new track ‘Additional Driver’.

At the time, Ogden explained on stage that the collaborative track was about a “minor collision in a car at the Apollo roundabout”, and later told NME the song came about in the same AirBnb in Anglesey where they wrote 2024 single ‘I Like Your Look’ with CMAT.

“I had to give a little disclaimer of what it was about, because it is ridiculous, but a lot of fun… the whole thing felt like a fever dream,” he said.

“We wrote with Declan for a week. One day, it got to 9 o’clock, we had a few drinks, and we started getting that groove of what the song is, and that bump – it wasn’t a crash, it was a bump – had just happened a couple of days before.

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“We started spitballing these ideas and ended up doing the vocals in the hot tub. It was, as you’d imagine, ridiculousness, but it ended up being fun the same way as [2024 album] ‘Gary’ was fun.

“I knew it had something, because ‘Gary’ gave us licence to do whatever the fuck we want… it was an element of trusting our gut. The video is ridiculous – which makes me want to do it more – we had the 192 [bus] going down the A6, and we recreated the scene outside the Apollo with fake police. It was a lot of fun.”

As for the rest of the contents of upcoming album ‘Songs From The Wedding Cake‘ – which is due out on October 2 and available to pre-order/pre-save here – Ogden told NME to expect “playfulness”, as well as appearances from Rick Astley and Inhaler’s Elijah Hewson.

On the latter, he told us he’d been “singing like Eli” when he thought: “‘This bit would sound great with Eli singing it’.

“So Joe was like, ‘Well, let’s just fucking message him.’ He sent us the vocals back the next day, he did it remotely at his place in London. In hip-hop world, for example, you’re always getting features and people jumping on each other’s tracks, so at this point we’re like, ‘Why can’t we do a bit of that?’”

As for the band’s longevity, Ogden said that’s what they’d been after from the start. “Resting on our laurels was never on the agenda for us, to be honest. Maybe because of where we’re from, once we got that opportunity with the record deal, we thought, ‘This is it. We’re going to grab it with both horns and go for it.’

“It’s nice to see we’re still in there. It feels like the biggest we’ve ever been, which [doesn’t] often happen – like you said, you can fall off – and I think that’s because we are so hungry.”