Blondie - The Hunter

The Hunter was Blondie's last word for seventeen years, a restless, globe-trotting 1982 album pressed here on 180 gram vinyl.

Coming off a run of genre-hopping smashes, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and company built a loose concept around pursuit: hunting, searching, chasing your own private summit. Mike Chapman, the producer behind Parallel Lines, Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican, returned for a fourth round, and the result is the band's most adventurous and least obvious record.

Lead single "Island of Lost Souls" sways on a breezy, tropical lilt, while "For Your Eyes Only" is the Bond theme that never was, written for the 1981 film and released here after the producers went another way. "English Boys" is a wistful salute to the long-haired Beatles generation, recorded in the shadow of John Lennon's death, and the closing cover of Smokey Robinson's "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" gives the Motown gem a cool, nocturnal sheen.

Critics and fans were divided at the time, and the band went quiet soon after, leaving this as an unexpected full stop in the band's story.

Heard now, it plays like a lost postcard from one of new wave's sharpest bands: ambitious, slightly strange and far more rewarding than its reputation suggests.