The Brighton-based trio head to Mancheter next week to play Aatma, 6 April. Vocalist Jessica Weiss and guitarist Daniel Falvey describe how the city influenced their sound.
Where are you from?
Jess: We’re from all over the place, but have been living in Brighton for the past few years. Brighton is a very creative musical city and we feel lucky to have ended up here.
What sort of music do you make?
Daniel: Dream pop.
How did you meet and when did you start writing songs?
Jess: I started writing songs when I was at art school, making ambient soundtracks for short films I was making. Daniel, who now plays guitar in the band, came to one of my exhibitions and we got talking about loop pedals and bands. We started making mixtapes for each other and from that started making music together. Michael, who plays drums, was an old friend and he really completed the jigsaw for us.
How has the band changed since it started?
Daniel: I think there is a clear progression from our early demos, which were quite lo-fi and stripped down, to our current material, which has a greater variety of texture and exploration of production, including incorporating electronic elements. We’ve become a more confident and experimental studio band and our recordings have become more bold as a result.
How much has touring influenced the sound of the new material?
Jess: We actually wrote and recorded it all before touring, so it’s been a reverse process really. Our first album, Loom, kept us on the road for about a year, then we had a year of writing and recording so it feels great to be playing shows again now.
Daniel: When we were touring the last album I was thinking that I wanted the songs to hit harder live so when it came to tour this album that helped inform the process. I wanted to really feel the bass and drums shake the stage so we focused on making the individual sounds stronger and not hiding things with layers on this album. There are less of the mid-tones and more of the highs and lows, and that was very deliberate.
Some have likened Jess to Morrissey in the way she references literature and writers in her lyrics. How influenced are you by Manchester bands?
Daniel: It probably has had more of an influence on us than any other city. It has a very special musical history. On this album I kept thinking about Joy Division in quite an abstract way. It wasn’t that I wanted us to sound like them in any way but I loved how they captured an atmosphere and how the individual instruments all had a very clear space so that they had a real impact.
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