Pennies By the Pound release third album, Love Stories, produced by Mark Gardener

Finnish progressive rock and progressive pop group Pennies by the Pound release their new album “Love Stories” independently on the 6th of June of 2025. A music video showcasing the song “A City of Divided Hearts” will be released on the very same day. With “Love Stories”, the band worked again in close collaboration with Ride frontman Mark Gardener, who produced, engineered and mixed the record. The album was recorded at his OX4 Sound studio in Oxfordshire, England.

As they have done in the past, Pennies by the Pound again takes their approach to prog rock towards yet another direction, with the band now being a five-piece for the first time. The six-track album comes with longer, more sprawling and adventurous tracks than before, mixed with a few more concise pieces for more accessible listening.

“We recruited our current drummer, Janne Aspvik, some time after finishing our previous effort, Nothingside, to get our live shows to a certain level. Without really any plans on making a new record so soon – much less recording it in England – we still somehow found ourselves in a situation with a bunch of new songs, and a willingness to put them on tape! In many ways this is the first proper band album we’ve done, and it was done with a very different mindset compared to the first two. We tried to keep it quite raw and very spontaneous, as opposed to lots and lots of time spent polishing every aspect. Working with Mark as a producer definitely facilitated that approach very well”, recalls frontman Johannes Susitaival.

“Love Stories” is initially available only on the band’s Bandcamp page as streaming and a digital purchase. The album will be released on other streaming platforms on the 27th of June, and a physical edition will follow later in the year in September.

The album release was preceded by an official visualizer for the track “Questions of Some Consequence, pt. 1 (The Three Martyrs of Oxford)”.

Formed in 2017 by Johannes Susitaival and Vesa Ranta in Helsinki, Finland, Pennies by the Pound later expanded first to a four-piece and then to its current five-piece incarnation. Before “Love Stories”, they have released two critically acclaimed albums, “Heat Death of the Universe” in 2021 and “Nothingside” in 2023.