Music Q&A:
The Orielles

What informs your music and songwriting?
Our music is informed largely by our everyday experiences and people and places we come across on tour. For example, songs such as Joey Says We Got It and I Only Bought It For The Bottle are influenced by people we have met on the road as well as everyday situations. Also we are influenced a lot by film and literature, especially when it comes to writing lyrics. We have been influenced by filmmakers and auteurs such as Nicolas Winding Refn, Quentin Tarantino and Yargos Lanthimos and their ways of using dialogue in films as well as particular aesthetical outputs to convey emotion. We try to replicate similar moods through music and sound.

How have you evolved as a band over the years?
We started out pretty young and inexperienced; two of us had never even touched an instrument before, let alone performed on stage, so I guess we have grown in confidence massively over the years and become more comfortable performing. Additionally, our sound has developed a lot, as we began by writing a lot of surf-pop tunes yet gradually developed into the band we are now, where we produce music more in keeping with our musical taste and the kind of music we all enjoy listening to. Our music taste has also become massively varied, taking inspiration from a lot of world music as well as dance music and post-punk. This has had an effect on our musical output and has meant that our style has gradually changed over the past couple of years.

What are you up to at the moment artistically?
We have just finished recording our debut album, which we’re psyched about! It has been a long process and a few of the tracks we’ve had written for over a year so we are excited to finally put those out. But we have also written a lot of new material, which hints at our future direction and we are most excited for people to hear these. Aside from the album we are continuing to play shows across the UK and Spain and have one of our largest UK headline dates to come in Manchester in December!

What’s on your rider?
Our rider is pretty basic really. We don’t ask for too much, ha! Usually gin and tonic, lager (usually Budweiser because it’s the only staple vegan beer), your usual hummus and pitta, avocados and tomatoes. If the promoter is feeling generous then we might request some kind of pudding so a white chocolate Kinder Bueno and a big bar of dark chocolate.

Tell us your most embarassing or surreal experience?
Most surreal experience was probably performing in Toronto in Canada. It was such a huge turning point for us as a band and we actually felt so blessed to be invited over there to play a bunch of shows. I remember our first day out there like it was yesterday; getting off the plane and entering into a whirlwind of excitement and hedonism. That week we were over there has inspired so much of our music and ideas since.

What song do you wish you’d written?
We wish we’d written Keep It Warm by Flo & Eddie. They pay homage to so many great artists in that song like The Beatles and Beach Boys and they do it in such a clever way! The lyrics in that song are also so poignant and, although it was written in the 1970s, are still so relevant today. We particularly love the lyric “elect another jerk to the White House… kill another whale with your power, or shoot a bunch of kids from your tower, snipe them in their cars, blood keeps them warm”. Don’t think we need to say anything more there really…

What’s your worst lyric?
All of our lyrics are pretty surreal or abstract so to outsiders they might all seem shit. We like them though.