Øverland-Knudsen is on the phone from his Liverpool home, where he’s relaxing after a long day of writing material for The Wombats’ third album. “Well, it’s a bit early to say what’s going to happen with this [unreleased] record; it’s really early in the process,” he says when I press him on details. “But hopefully it will be a lot faster [and] we’ll get it out quicker than the second album (last year’s This Modern Glitch) – it took three years from the first to the second. So hopefully it will be coming out in 2013. As far as what it’s going to sound like, we’ve got a template for what we want to do, we’ve got a lot more keyboards. We’re not finished, but we want to keep exploring that part of the music.
“We’ve been together for eight and a half years now,” he laughs. “So maybe we’ll put out our third album on our ten year anniversary!”
The Wombats have been slowly but surely building a huge fan base over the last few years. After spending many of their early years happily releasing EPs and the occasional country-specific LP, in 2007 they recorded their first “proper” full-length. The heartily frenetic and outright fun A Guide To Love Loss And Desperation featuring the upbeat and jangling hit Let’s Dance To Joy Division, and cemented The Wombats’ reputation for off-kilter electronic-tinged indie-pop.
I ask Øverland-Knudsen about the growth inherent between A Guide To … and This Modern Glitch. Any significant differences in how they approached these two records, or was it a case of sticking with what worked? “[The process] was very different, actually,” he admits. “I think it’s the same with a lot of bands; when you do your first record, you’ve played it live already, so when you go into the studio, you have everything sort of ready, kind of like arranged. We recorded the first record live, just the three of us playing live with hardly any overdubs; and then we added vocals and maybe a couple of keyboard lines, whatever.
“But on [This Modern Glitch], we never played the songs live, so we didn’t know quite how to – we just explored the possibilities in a studio, playing around with the gear a lot more, and constantly changing things around. It took six to eight months, while the first one took less than three weeks!”
The writing process for The Wombats would seem to have evolved as well. Informing Øverland-Knudsen that I can easily imagine the three of them sitting in a room, drinking beer and jamming together as they write, I get a laugh from him as he tells me that I’m only half-wrong.
“Usually we’ll compose a skeleton of a song and then we’ll dress it up with arrangements or hook-lines. When we were back in Melbourne [touring for A Guide To …], we set about jamming for a bit, just jamming … we started playing a little hook-line and we ended up playing for an hour. We started to record a lot of the jams we did – and out of the jams we made a few songs. One of them was actually Jump Into The Fog (the second single off This Modern Glitch)! So I think [jamming] is something we’re going to do a lot more of on [the third record].”
I note that The Wombats seem to have a special relationship with Australia, having played the Parklife Festival in 2010, two individual shows at the Palais and Festival Hall here in Melbourne in 2011, and now visiting again for the 2012 Future Music Festival. What is it about Australia that keeps them coming back?
“We love playing there,” he says, “but I think it’s also quite a high demand; people want us to come back as well. It’s kind of like a home away from home; it’s just a feeling that we get. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ll tell you what, it’s a lot more fun than other places we play! It’s just quite fun to go and play shows there.
“We’re looking forward to this show,” he continues, cheerily. “In fact, we got some time off between [Sydney and Melbourne], we got a week off. So we get to relax and just be there and have some fun!”
At this point in our talk, the operator comes onto the line and informs us we only have one minute left before I have to end my conversation with Øverland-Knudsen. So naturally, I ask him the most important question ever: What was their cameo on the soap opera Neighbours like, and how on earth did it come about?
Øverland-Knudsen laughs loud and long at this. “True story,” he begins. “It was when we had first come to Australia (September 2008), and we’d met our label for the first time. They were like, ‘What do you want to do when you come to Australia? What do you want us to do?’ We were just joking, and said, ‘We want to be on Neighbours, really.’
“And one of the girls at the label, she knew the producer or something, and she said, ‘Yeah! I think I can do that for you!’ And a few months later, we got on the show.
“But yeah,” he continues, with an audible smile, “I don’t think the music was the main attraction of the scene, I think people were having a conversation, and the music was sort of in the background. It’s good to have done it, though!”
Exactly. Ask and you will receive?
“Absolutely.”
BY THOMAS BAILEY
