Photo by Klaus Thymann
Especially when you are having some kind of success. You’ll have to change your approach. Think differently about yourself and your music. Being against everything might be easier than being able to go on with what you wanna do.
I think we’ve been lucky that we never ever been told what to do. Domino, as a label, would never tell us what to do. We have harder time to tell each other what to do. They might hint that they’d like a couple more singles. But they always just release what we give them. I think we’re in an age where your first album is expected your defining piece of work. And when that didn’t happen for us, and it wasn’t world domination immediately, honestly, it felt like a great failure: Oh my god, can we even be a band anymore, is there any point? But I think that was crucial in the making of us. Kind of like: This is the worst that can happen? Let’s just keep going. What it gave us is a huge amount of room to grow from. I hear a lot of music that i don’t think is made with the same humanistic realizations. I think you probably can still hear that hurt in our music, which I think is a good thing. I don’t want to disown our older records. We do still have this slight element of us against the world in our mentality, but we are also aware that we sound very different. I think you also develop more cutting and detailed ways of expressing yourself.
How did that change? Were you a band standing in your rehearsal space and just jamming and now you’re using different techniques?
Definitely. Just through learning. When we started out we had no idea of how to use recording software or anything like that. You just genuinely develop it. There is a gap between wanting to attain a level and being able to attain that level. And its that gap which makes you go forward. Nowadays, there is a big push to be satisfied immediately: I want this now – I can have it now. A lot of what our culture is built on is being immediately associated. But I think good things come out of maybe a bit slow burning kind of growth.
That seems rather controlled and self aware. Is it like: Push a button and you’ll get the sound you had in mind now?
Well, it’s not quite as graceful as that.
Or is it still more stumbling upon..?
There is a lot of stumbling. There should be an element of coping around in the dark. Otherwise why do it? I do think that music, or any art-form, is work. It’s something you do rather than something you are. But there surely is something you can’t explain as well. That is the way it is because that’s how it is. It’s hard to explain, cause it’s as small as it can possibly be.
How is the next record gonna sound?
I think we’ll invert. I expect it to be very invertive from what it is now. Cause this was an invertion from smother definitely.
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