Back with new release Pop Guilt, Screamfeeder are proving that no matter how much time the group spend apart, that same magic is always there. As bassist Kellie Lloyd explains, while not producing music as Screamfeeder, they’ve been far from idle on the music scene, taking on other projects to keep their skills and passion well-polished.
“It’s been just over ten years since we released a studio album,” says Lloyd. “Tim [guitarist Tim Steward] started another band called We All Want To which he focused on for a bit, we also re-released a back catalogue on vinyl through Poison City Records.
“I put out a solo record a few years ago and concentrated on that and we just went about having a life, doing stuff outside of the band, because it had been such a big part of our lives for such a long time – we all caught up on life.
“We went off and did other things and worked with other people and while we moved apart from each other, coming back to write together we knew we had a good way of communicating with each other, we spoke the same language musically. The break was really good because learning how you do things with other people sharpens how you do things again.”
As to the evolution of Screamfeeder’s members in the context of songwriting and performing, relaying that progression through the new release, it’s a point of reflection that Lloyd admits to have no clear perspective on. “It’s a little bit hard to stand back from that when you’re in the middle of it,” she says.
“The evolution of it is time and being better players. I know I’m a much, much better player than I was, a much better singer. I have a lot more confidence around what I do. We had a lot of time constraints with the new album so we didn’t have time to second guess ourselves which was really cool for us. We can tend to overthink and overanalyse and go in and change stuff, and this whole process meant we didn’t have the luxury of touring songs we’d already written, road testing them, we went in to the studio and recorded them straight away.”
Like many musicians, Lloyd tries to avoid the word ‘organic’. Eecording Pop Guilt was for Screamfeeder a revelation of the band at their most raw. “When you’re writing, you’re drawing on what’s going on immediately around you,” says Lloyd.
“Tim writes lyrically – he tends to write stories and tends to look back and taps in to stories about nostalgia maybe, I’ve picked that up in some lyrics. With me, it makes sense for me to write about what’s around me in that moment in a lot of ways.”
By Anna Rose
