These days, the band’s three members are scattered around the globe, but they regrouped in Melbourne last year to put together album number four. Ahead of a brief run of Australian shows this month, Mixdown caught up with bass-player and vocalist and Liam Andrews.
The band’s no longer based in Melbourne. Where are you all living at the moment?
I’ve been over in Europe for a good three or four years now, mostly in London and I spent all of last year living in Barcelona. Ben [Andrews, guitar] moved to Jakarta last year, so he’s been in Indonesia for about six months. But Rohan [Rebeiro]’s been strongly held here.
The next My Disco album is due in the second half of 2015. You recorded it at Electric Dreams in Melbourne with Cornel Wilzcek. How much time went into making this album?
We’ve been working on and off on music for this for the last couple of years, but we recorded it in full in December-January. And it was written in full about six months prior to that. It’s looking like it will be a late 2015 release.
It’s been more than four years since Little Joy came out. Is the delay simply a result of involving yourselves with other projects and living apart from each other? Or did you need creative space before doing another My Disco album?
Definitely being apart – not living in the same city and not having that routine of going to the studio and attempting to write music every week. But I think creatively it was nice to be apart and to do a few other things in life. We did feel quite refreshed when we commenced writing this record, which was literally done in the space of two or three months.
This is the band’s fourth record. Does the creative process involve looking back at your earlier releases to see what’s missing from the My Disco repertoire?
We don’t look back. With this we really just pursued a sound, and being written in a short period of time, it has a coherent sound as a record. It’s something we don’t speak too much about, it’s just when we get in the room together it’ll just click in.
What can you tell me about the album? It’s been described as long, slow and heavy, and darker than anything you’ve done previously.
That’s definitely the case. These songs are of a slower pace and have a much heavier feel to them. From the people I’ve played them to, it’s been taken as quite intense and rather bleak. Listening back to the mixes, it’s feeling relevant to the record we wanted to make. Quite often you go into an album with songs and an idea of how you want them to sound, but it might not quite get there. But working with Cornel on this, we’ve had great help from him in terms of the production. We’ve had an idea of a sound and we’ve really alleviated that with the production in the studio.
When you entered the writing process, did you already know that you wanted to make something darker?
I think we all felt that. We played around with writing and experimenting with other ideas, but then it just quite naturally came around to this – where we just started writing this way. It’s still very rhythmic and repetitive, but there’s a lot more space and ambience in the guitars and a much darker sound across the board.
What explains the added darkness? Is there anything in particular that triggered the bleaker departure?
I don’t really know. I think it’s just something that we all felt comfortable with, just a mood. It might reflect a lot of music we listen to. It’s not like we have a discussion about it and we express our feelings. It’s just, musically that’s what we felt comfortable with and what we felt best represented our sound as a band right now.
On the subject of music you listen to, in the past you’ve touched on a whole range of genres without pledging allegiance to anything in particular. If you find yourselves doing something conventional, do you tend to pull back and move in another direction?
Only if it’s not feeling right. We would never do it just for the fact that might be a conventional sound or riff or rhythm. If it suits and works for what we’re trying to accomplish, then I have no problem with that.
You’re doing a short run of Australian shows this June. Will you be playing much from the new album?
It will be all the new music from the new record. Everything before it is well past its use-by date for us to be performing. Something we’ve always done as a band is to keep moving from relevant music to the next. It just feels much more comfortable. Playing old songs we wrote five or ten years ago is not very cohesive in terms of the sound of the new songs also. We’re creating a mood when we perform and trying not to break that concentration of sound.
TOUR DATES
June 7 – The Toff in Town, Melbourne VIC
June 12 – Ancient World, Adelaide SA
June 19 – Dark Mofo, Hobart TAS
June 26 – Good God Small Club, Sydney NSW
For more information visit www.mydisco.com.au.
