The band recently teamed up with producer Cornel Wilzcek at Melbourne’s Electric Dreams studios to work on their fourth album. Ahead of a brief run of Australian shows this month, Beat speaks with bass-player and vocalist Liam Andrews about the forthcoming release.
“We’ve been working on and off on music for this for the last couple of years,” he says, “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 the band’s previous effort, Little Joy. Not long after the album’s release, Andrews relocated to London. More recently, he’s been based in Barcelona, while guitarist Ben Andrews lives in Indonesia and drummer Rohan Rebeiro remains in Melbourne.
“I think creatively it was nice to be apart and to do a few other things in life,” Andrews says. “We did feel quite refreshed when we commenced writing this record, which was literally done in the space of two or three months. It’s quite amazing how the three of us are on the same page as to what is and what is not working.”
The band’s renewed enthusiasm hasn’t given rise to a brighter sonic palette. On the contrary, the forthcoming album has been flagged as slower, heavier and darker than anything My Disco have done previously.
“From the people I’ve played them to, it’s been taken as quite intense and rather bleak,” Andrews says. “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.”
There’s no shortage of things that could inspire bleak artistic works; just a quick glance at the news headlines will do it, or perhaps the changes in the band members’ personal lives coincided with patches of vulnerability or depression. However, Andrews says the slower, heavier sound emerged without much planning.
“We played around with writing and experimenting with other ideas, but then it just quite naturally came around to this. 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. 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.”
On the subject of the music they listen to, in spite of experimenting with a multitude of familiar genres, My Disco have distanced themselves from easy pigeon-holing. But building such a reputation has never been the ultimate aim.
“We would never [reject something] just for the fact that might be a conventional sound or riff or rhythm,” Andrews says. “If it suits and works for what we’re trying to accomplish, then I have no problem with that.”
Fittingly, My Disco are premiering material from the forthcoming album at Hobart’s Dark Mofo Festival later in the month. The band are also playing a hometown show this Sunday night at The Toff in Town.
“It will be all the new music from the new record,” Andrews says. “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. We’re creating a mood when we perform and trying not to break that concentration of sound.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
