Paradise follows 2014’s Deep Fantasy, and White Lung wanted this record to be reflective of its context. “I find a lot of rock bands in general look into the past, recording with all analogue gear and pretending they’re Led Zeppelin,” says William. “We wanted to do something completely different to that and make it sound very unnatural and very modern. We approached it the same way that a lot of people record electronic music; we recorded a bunch of little parts and stuck them together without recording anything together as a band live off the floor at all. A lot of the song arrangements and structures ended up being a lot different to how we originally wrote them. We cut and pasted a lot of things – if someone had a new idea in the studio we could make it happen instantly.”
Marked by a competitive interplay between William’s guitar and Mish Barber-Way’s vocal melodies and lyrics, Paradise steps beyond the harsh onslaught of Deep Fantasy. Backed up by Anne-Marie Vassiliou’s drumming, here the three band members merge into a tight melodic unit.
“Mish has gotten better at writing melodies, this is the best she’s ever done,” William says. “Even though we try to make everything work together melodically, this album is unique as we both worked completely separately. With Deep Fantasy, we worked together in Los Angeles for most of the time. This time we actually worked completely separately with me writing in Vancouver and Mish writing in Los Angeles. We barely even worked in the studio together. I would go in and do guitar on my own for a few days, then Mish would come in and record her vocals. Working with Pro Tools we had the ability to cut and move things around a lot so there was never really any issue of things not sticking together in a way that worked.”
Deciding to focus more on the recording and technical production aspects with this album, the band enlisted producer Lars Stalfors, known for his work with Cold War Kids, Alice Glass and Health, among others.
“He was really good working with Pro Tools and helping out with guitar pedals I used,” William says. “He has a lot of great suggestions for gear that we could use to push our sound further. I’m not really much of a gear guy. Normally I’ve just used a distortion and delay pedal, but he had a lot of crazy equipment that we messed around with and got some interesting sounds.”
Deviating from the punk rock norm, William plans to employ some relatively complicated gadgets to reproduce the record’s dense sound live. “I’ve integrated a MIDI pedal and a sampler that I’ll be incorporating into our live show, so I can record samples and trigger them live with my guitar. In the past I wouldn’t do many overdubs and double tracking on guitar, but Lars helped me achieve new ways of being able to play crazy new sounds live on stage. One of our rules as a band is that we won’t record anything that we can’t play live.”
So is William satisfied they’ve made record that represents White Lung circa-2016? “It’s exciting,” he says, “and I think it points to new ways we can write songs and push things forward.”
BY JOE HANSEN
