The Pixies Battle the Undead and Welcome Their Latest Bass Player on New ‘Zombies’ Album

Earlier this year, former Band of Skulls bassist Emma Richardson was painting in her London studio when the phone rang. It was producer Tom Dalgety with a rather urgent matter to discuss. He was working on a new record with the Pixes, and they had an all-too-familiar problem to solve: They’d just parted ways with yet another bass player, their third, and had to fill the spot, quickly. Was she interested?

“The call came totally out of the blue and was an incredible surprise,” Richardson tells Rolling Stone. “I had stopped making music, and was focusing on painting full time. It was one of those calls that I’ll never forget.”

Before she knew it, Richardson was cutting tracks for the new Pixies LP The Night the Zombies Came, which arrives Oct. 25. It’s a typically eclectic Pixies record that touches on everything from shopping malls and medieval theme restaurants to bog people, druidism, and zombies. In fact, the living dead pop up so many times throughout the 13 tracks that Pixies leader Charles Thompson opted to give the album a title straight out of a horror movie.

“It’s not like I wrote a bunch of songs about zombies or that we tried to make the album sound scary or anything like that,” Thompson tells Rolling Stone via Zoom while pacing around a hotel room in Austin, Texas. “‘Zombie’ is just an associative word. You can do with it what you like. And it’s not a concept record, but that word kept popping up in the lyrics. When I combed through all the other lyrics for a title, they just sounded corny as shit. The only thing that made sense was The Night the Zombies Came. And I was like, ‘You know what? That’s a pretty good title. I’d go see that movie.'”

The albums begins with the folky “Primose.” “It might be my favorite song from the session,” says Thompson. “I didn’t sit down to write a folky song. I wrote, and that’s just the way it came out.” It’s followed by “You’re So Impatient,” a more traditional Pixies tune about a shopping mall and a themed family restaurant. “If you understand what a suburb is, you understand the Mutton and Mead [a Renaissance-themed eatery] and the fake experiences of suburbia,” he says. “It’s about the world of the mall, of the suburban architecture, the dystopian experience.”

Things remain surreal on “Jane (The Night the Zombies Came)” (“He was walking besides her/She was the only survivor”), get even weirder on “Chicken” (“Sometimes I feel like a chicken/pecking my way through the trees/When something aloft cuts my head right off/Now I’m dealing with decapitation”), and descend into punk intensity on “Oyster Beds” (“I painted heads/In lots of reds/And pools of black/In oyster beds”).

It wraps up with “The Vegas Suite,” which is built around the Fifties standard “Que Sera Sera.” The band originally recorded it for the MGM+ science-fiction horror series From. “When you really look at the libretto of that song, it’s got a kind of ominous tone to it,” says Thompson. “I just shifted the melody so that some of the chords land on a minor chord, and then suddenly you’ve got this kind of Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen-type reading of the song.”

These songs were all written before Richardson joined the band, and she laid down her bass parts remotely before even meeting them in person. “It felt quite a natural process,” she says. “I had Carol Kaye in the back of my mind a little bit, as an incredible bass player. And I just wanted to serve the songs, just being the glue a little bit, and working with what they have. I saw which songs needed certain tones, or a certain feel to it bass-wise, which was fun.

“There are so many beautiful choruses where it blooms out,” she continues. “It’s quite filmic. There’s a slight nostalgic romanticism to it, and there’s folklore in ‘Primose.’ I love the way that song builds. All my hair stands on end whenever I listen to it.”

Once the album was done, Richardson had to prepare for an extensive year of touring, beginning with a special series of European shows featuring complete performances of 1990’s Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe le Monde. This was daunting even for Thompson, guitarist Joey Santiago, and drummer David Lovering since several songs from the two albums hadn’t been played live in more than 30 years, or even a single time in the case of “Space (I Believe In).”

“It seemed very laborious,” says Thompson. “I was almost like, ‘Why did I suggest doing this tour?’ I had to learn all these songs I’d never played live before. It just felt like it would feel tedious or like homework. But we did it and it wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be. It was actually delightful since because the audience was there to hear that stuff.”

Rehearsals for the tour were held in L.A., and they finally provided an opportunity for Richardson to meet her new bandmates in the flesh. “It was amazing to finally play with them live, and it felt natural. I learned all the songs by repetition, just playing them daily,” she says. “It was great to pick them apart and just play them over and over.”

The job required not just recreating bass parts originated by Kim Deal, but replicating her lush harmonies as well. “I love the tone of her voice, and her phrasing,” Richardson says. “My singing voice has a slightly lower register, but it feels doable.”

The new lineup of the Pixies first faced the public March 8 at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. “I hadn’t played live for a good four years or so,” says Richardson. “There was a lot of pressure to do well and not mess up. But then it was just a big thrill to be able to be a part of it, and to play those songs live.”

The months that followed were a blur of airports, hotels, and backstage dressing rooms all across Europe and North America. “Prior to that I was painting a lot, so I was on my own in my own studio, solitary environment,” Richardson says. “And then to be thrown back into that live world, playing in front of lots of people every night…it’s been a roller coaster.”

The Pixies have been on that roller coaster ever since they reformed in 2004, a little over a decade after a fairly acrimonious breakup. They were little more than a cult act during their original run, but their legend grew significantly once they exited the stage. Throughout the past two decades, they’ve played to far larger crowds than they ever faced in the Eighties and Nineties.

The band just kicked off a European tour, and are headed to Australia in November for a run of stadium dates with Pearl Jam. Plans beyond that aren’t clear, but Richardson is eager to be a part of whatever happens.

“We’re quite fortunate,” says Thompson. “We can work any night of the week, anywhere on the planet, 365 days a year if we wanted to. We could just play, play, play like the Energizer Bunny, and never stop if we wanted to. I mean, that would kill us, we couldn’t do that. But I’m saying in theory, we could. That’s a nice place to be.”

The Night the Zombies Came track list: