A CERTAIN RATIO - It All Comes Down To This LP

A Certain Ratio were chewed up and spat out by the music industry for forty years. With their masters in hand, they split with Factory Records in 1986 following a financial squabble with label founder Tony Wilson, whose ‘artist friendly’ no contract ethos meant royalties were never paid.

However, Wilson always had the cash to fund two things: hard drugs and Martin Hannett (Factory Records’ de-facto in-house producer whose success with Unknown Pleasures was never extended to a Ratio LP).

Next, a major label deal with A+M, where they were dropped following 1989’s Good Together – an expensive and banal non-charter.

They trudged through the 90s and 00s, before signing to Mute for a back-catalogue deal in 2017, which basically means, “we like you, but we’re not paying for you to make new music”.

Eventually, the band managed to sway the contract, and thank God they did. ACR’s best work has undoubtedly been produced in the last few years.

Peering out from the shadow cast by their Band on the Wall contemporaries Joy Division and The Fall, their thirteenth album It All Comes Down To This is their strongest since 1982’s Sextet.