Cold Spring to reissue Coil classic ‘Backwards’ for 10th anniversary
Cold Spring to reissue Coil classic 'Backwards' for 10th anniversary
Coil’s post-industrial album “Backwards” will be reissued by UK label Cold Spring on January 23, 2026 as a 10-year anniversary vinyl edition. The campaign marks a decade since Cold Spring first issued the long-circulating album on CD and double vinyl in 2015.
Cold Spring offers three 2×LP + CD bundles via its store and Bandcamp. The “Fire Red” 2×LP + CD edition, on double “cloud” red vinyl, is limited to 300 copies, with a maximum of two copies per customer and availability only through Cold Spring. The “Cold White” 2×LP + CD edition on white vinyl is limited to 500 copies. A standard black 2×LP + CD is also available. All variants come in a gatefold matt-laminate sleeve with silver hot-foil detail. Alongside the vinyl bundles, Cold Spring also carries a standalone CD in a six-panel digipak and a digital edition
Not that all orders placed directly with Cold Spring include the first release of the complete “Backwards Demos” as a 10-track CD sourced from Danny Hyde’s original files, plus a poster and an artcard.
The 12-track album plays as follows: “Intro”, “Backwards”, “Amber Rain”, “Fire Of The Green Dragon”, “Be Careful What You Wish For”, “Nature Is A Language”, “Heaven’s Blade”, “Copacaballa”, “Paint Me As A Dead Soul”, “Ayor (It’s In My Blood)”, “A Cold Cell”, and “Fire Of The Mind”.
About Coil
Coil formed in London, England, in 1982 as an experimental project started by John Balance (Jhonn Balance) and soon joined by Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, who had previously worked in Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. The group became associated with post-industrial, electronic and experimental music, while also using aliases such as Black Light District, ELpH and Time Machines for specific projects.
The debut studio album “Scatology” appeared in 1984–85 through the Force & Form and K.422 imprints linked to Some Bizzare Records, followed in 1986 by “Horse Rotorvator”. Coil’s 1991 album “Love’s Secret Domain” pushed further into electronic and acid-house-inflected territory and produced the singles “Windowpane” and “The Snow”.
From the early 1990s onward, Balance and Christopherson developed the body of work that would later be known as “Backwards”, working first in London and later, in 1996, at Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studios in New Orleans. Parts of this material resurfaced in altered form on the posthumous album “The Ape Of Naples” (2005) and on “The New Backwards” (2008), while Cold Spring’s 2015 issue of “Backwards” presented the original sequence.
The album was written by Hyde, Drew McDowall, Jhonn Balance, and Peter Christopherson with Coil and Danny Hyde handling co-production and mixing. Gregg Janman took care of the mastering.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Coil focused on the two-volume “Musick To Play In The Dark” series and related releases, which documented a shift toward what the band called “moon musick”. Coil ceased following Balance’s death in November 2004; Christopherson oversaw posthumous releases, including the first public issues of the “Backwards”-era recordings, until his own death in 2010.
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