Ride on their latest album, ‘Interplay’

It’s actually a little hard to believe that English rock group Ride, who first broke up in 1996 after eight years as a band, has now been together for a decade this second time around.

As co-founder Andy Bell points out in today’s session, this version of Ride might be the definitive iteration. Bell, along with Mark Gardener, Loz Colbert and Steve Queralt were early pioneers of shoegaze, alongside contemporaries like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Eight-minute anthems like “Leave Them All Behind” were Top 10 hits in the U.K., but the Ride of today has fused shoegaze with another love: the ’80s synth pop of Depeche Mode and Talk Talk.

In this session, Bell talks about the evolution of Ride and how they found the bullseye on their latest album, Interplay.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.