'Outlander's Andrew Gower Officially Teases Gustaffson’s “Finest Work Yet” [Exclusive]

Image via Debbie Ellis Published Oct 19, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT Maggie Lovitt is the Deputy News Editor at Collider. In addition to reporting on the latest entertainment news, she is also an actor and member of the Screen Actors Guild based out of the Mid-Atlantic Region. Lovitt is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Critics Choice Association and National Press Club. While she spends her time writing and editing articles about the entertainment industry, Maggie’s background is actually in history and anthropology. She loves it whenever she can bring those two facets of her life together, such as with reviews for series like We Were the Lucky Ones and The New Look, and engaging interviews with talent like Ben Mendelsohn, Liev Schreiber, or Jonas Nay. Sign in to your Collider account Early last year, Outlander star Andrew Gower’s band Gustaffson debuted their first album, Black & White Movie, to critical acclaim. Now, nearly eighteen months later, they’re back on the tour circuit as they gear up for the launch of their yet-to-be-announced second album in 2027. In preparation for its release, Gower and Gustaffson are looking back at a trio of tracks from the elbow-produced album with brand-new acoustic versions. For these stripped-down tracks, Gustaffson headed back to where it all began: the iconic Blueprint Studios in Manchester. The first to be released is “Closer,” which arrives ahead of their Manchester gig at YES’ The Pink Room on the 7th. After that, "Paris in Summer" and "Go Easy” will be the next acoustic versions to be released, as the band plays London and Liverpool. "Closer" first arrived as a music video last March, that paid homage to an iconic Sir Ben Kingsley interview that struck a creative chord for Gower. The music video featured self-tapes from a real who's who of talent, including Daredevil: Born Again's Arty Froushan to Shadow & Bones' Freddy Carter. The new bare-bones version of the track features Gower and the band in the studio making magic happen. "I like to think that most Gustaffson tracks can be performed with just me, Webbo, and a guitar,” Gower shared in a conversation with Collider ahead of the video’s release. “It is a home from home. We made the first album there. We made the first EP there. We made the second album there, which is on its way in 2027. We just knew after [playing] some stripped-back shows during the summer, the only place we wanted to record music right now is with Gary and Craig and the team at Blueprint.” He went on to say: “I think when you have artistic or career ambitions, those risks you take — if you can find the building, or the company, or the business where you can take those risks, especially within the arts — we've definitely found that in Blueprint. It feels strange when we're not there to be honest, as opposed to there." Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Classic Album Perfectly Matches Your Vibe? Rumours · Dark Side · Purple Rain · Nevermind Eight specific questions: what you walk out of a record shop holding, where you do your best listening, what you do with a song you love, how you behave the week something ends. Answer honestly and we will tell you which of the four biggest records ever made has been describing you this whole time. 🪞Rumours(1977) 🔺Dark Side(1973) 🏍️Purple Rain(1984) 🌊Nevermind(1991) FIND YOUR ALBUM → 01 What do you walk out of a record shop holding? You went in for one thing. You never leave with one thing. ASomething I already know every word to. BA record I plan to sit with alone. CWhichever one has the best cover. DSomething nobody at work has heard of. NEXT QUESTION → 02 What do you do the week a relationship ends? Rumours exists because five people all did this at once. ATell all my friends everything, immediately. BGo quiet and think about it for months. CBuy an outfit and go out looking incredible. DPlay one album until the neighbours complain. NEXT QUESTION → 03 What is playing in your car on the way home? The twenty minutes nobody else gets a vote on. AWhatever the person beside me picked. BOne album, start to finish, no skipping. CSomething I can sing at full volume. DA playlist nobody else would recognise. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How do you behave in an argument with a friend? Be honest. Somebody is reading this over your shoulder. ASay everything, then apologise tomorrow. BGo silent and work out what I think. CMake it a performance and win the room. DLeave, and stay gone a while. NEXT QUESTION → 05 Where do you stand when the lights go down at a gig? Everybody has a spot and nobody ever changes it. AIn the middle with my whole group. BRight at the back, properly listening. CFront row, hands up, no phone out. DBy the sound desk where the mix works. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Which film do you put on when you cannot sleep? The one you have seen so often it works as a nightlight. AAlmost Famous, for the hundredth time. BBlade Runner, mostly for the atmosphere. CStop Making Sense, turned right up. DClerks, or something equally scrappy. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you do with a song you have fallen for? The first forty-eight hours tell you everything. ASend it to twelve people within an hour. BReplay it alone and say nothing. CLearn it well enough to perform it. DGuard it until the band gets big. NEXT QUESTION → 08 What do you want a great record to do to you? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your album. AMake the mess feel worth it. BMake me think about something properly. CMake me want to be looked at. DMake me feel like I found it first. REVEAL MY ALBUM → Side A, Track One Your Album Is…Nevermind turned thirty-five last month and the arguments started up again immediately, which is what these four records do. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the case for it being the best album on the list. RumoursYou are the beautiful disaster who keeps everybody together anyway. Rumours was made by five people who were all breaking up with each other in the same room and refusing to stop working, and it came out sounding like the sunniest record of the decade. You process everything out loud, in company, and your friends know far more than they should. It won Album of the Year at the 1978 Grammys and has sold somewhere past forty million copies since. Daisy Jones & The Six was built almost entirely on this era, which is how you know the drama still sells. Your risk is the band's risk, which is mistaking the chaos for the thing that makes you good. Dark Side of the MoonYou are the one who went quiet and came back with a theory. Dark Side is an album about time, money, pressure and losing your mind, built so carefully that it still sounds like it was finished yesterday. You need silence and a long walk before you can tell anybody what you think. It spent well over nine hundred weeks on the Billboard 200, a run no other album has come close to. The Wizard of Oz sync myth has outlived several generations of stoned students and refuses to die. You can overthink a thing until it stops being fun, and the people around you notice before you do. Purple RainYou are the main character and you have never pretended otherwise. Purple Rain is an album, a film and a complete personality delivered at once, by somebody who decided he was going to be the most interesting person alive and then simply was. You walk into a room and adjust it, and you would rather be talked about than ignored. Prince won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score in 1985, and nobody has won it since. The film is a genuinely strange piece of work, and the title track live is still the high-water mark. Your weakness is needing the audience, which is fine until the night nobody turns up. NevermindYou want it on your own terms or not at all. Nevermind is the record that dragged the underground into the middle of the mainstream and then spent the rest of its life uncomfortable about having done it. You are suspicious of anything everybody agrees on, including the things you loved first. It knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard 200 in January 1992 and changed what radio sounded like. It turned thirty-five in September, and the reissue arguments have been running ever since. Your flaw is that liking something popular feels like losing, and you miss good records that way. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ Gustaffson’s Second Album Is Their “Finest Work Yet” Gower credits the aesthetics of the live acoustic version of “Closer” to the video’s director, Steffany Collette, who the band affectionately calls “Freda” after Freda Kelly, The Beatles’ friend who, as Gower put it, “joined them on a journey and started out doing their fan mail and then became an exec.” Collette was given free rein with the trio of acoustic videos, and she chose the first to harken back to where it began with Black & White Movie, giving the video a real old-school black-and-white look. “The saturated style lends itself to the acts we've spoken about — The Beatles, The Doors — and all of that old footage." As he noted during our chat, a band only gets the opportunity to release their second album once, so Gustaffson is smartly taking advantage of the time between the two albums to keep interest high. “We're sitting on the second album. We want to keep the appetite for our music up. I think that's why we went straight back in, because we knew that this year we wanted to give people something alongside the tour, and we thought these acoustic versions would be perfect." He went on to explain the method behind this new release: “There's a beauty in a world where things happen so quickly. I always say the world should learn to wait. What they're waiting for, I think, is our finest work yet. But in the meantime, that doesn't mean we can't reimagine versions of songs that people think they know everything about and give them a new take on it." Andrew Gower Is Teaming Up With Andy Goddard on a New Movie Gower brings a natural intuitiveness for immersive storytelling to Gustaffson. From the release of their debut album Black & White Movie to timely, tech-challenging tracks like "Dance to the Algorithm," the band's identity is rooted in finding the profound in the mundane — and connecting Gower’s two great loves: film and music. By consistently recruiting brilliant collaborators from his acting career, such as Bear McCreary, Sharon D. Clarke, and soon, Andy Goddard, Gower is pioneering a space where music and cinema don't just coexist, but actively elevate one another. “I've spent most of my career as Andrew Gower the actor, and to go and be in a band, to be a part of a collective, and also I include the audience into that, as I always say, the Gustaffson tribe, that whole collective experience has kind of really blown me away." Looking ahead to 2027, Gustaffson is set to release their second album, kick off a tour (with international plans), and work with record stores across the UK. “High-scale videos have been recorded for the new album,” Gower teased, before hinting at even bigger plans on the horizon for the band. “As I have alluded to in the past, a Gustaffson-scored film is in development as well right now. 2027 is going to be a busy year and a year that breaks the mold of what we've done before." While details about the project are being largely kept under wraps, Gower did confirm that it’s a “family story” connected to a relative of his. He is working on the film alongside Andy Goddard, who is currently working on Apple TV’s new Monarch spin-off in Prague. Goddard will write and direct the film, with Gower set to star in it, as well as composing the score. “When Andy's all finished over in Prague, we will be getting some development in order for that. The songs are written, and the story's there." Stay tuned to Collider for more updates on Gustaffson.