Neil Finn is reborn after stint with Fleetwood Mac to deliver best Crowded House album in years

With two of Finn’s sons joining him on Gravity Stairs, the band are back to their mid-1990s peak

Crowded House, from left: Mitchell Froom, Elroy and Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Liam Finn

John Meagher

Fans of Lindsey Buckingham may have been annoyed when Neil Finn replaced him on Fleetwood Mac’s world tour, but the experience proved a revitalising tonic for one of New Zealand’s great music exports (who also happens to be an Irish passport holder, by dint of his mother.)

Not only did Finn fit seamlessly into the Fleetwood Mac world — if a superb show at Dublin’s RDS is anything to go by — but he says the experience also helped to reboot his own creativity as Crowded House frontman and songwriter in chief.

Finn was seemingly born with a knack for crafting great tunes, for making the business of delivering super-catchy melodies look easy. And so it is on Gravity Stairs, the band’s eighth studio album, and arguably their most consistently strong set since their mid-1990s peak.

The Crowded House of 2024 is more of a family affair than ever with multi-instrumentalists Liam and Elroy Finn joining dad Neil. Stalwarts Mitchell Froom and one-time Dublin resident Nick Seymour are present and correct.

Several of these songs can stand shoulder to shoulder with the band’s best. All That I Can Ever Own is gorgeously wrought — a Beatlesque delight, as so many of Finn’s compositions are — and packs several ideas into a lean three minutes. “Love is in my heart,” he sings. “It’s all that I can ever own.”

The Howl is a quintessential Crowded House song — a sweet melange of guitars and keyboards, it sounds as though it’s always existed. You’ll be humming along on second listen.

The album will get an airing when the band play Cork’s Virgin Media Park — that’s Musgrave Park, to rugby heads — on June 23.

Read more