Why Sleepmakeswaves Crowdfunded Their New Album

"So it’s been a really busy start to 2014,” sleepmakeswaves’ bespectacled guitarist Otto Wicks-Green shares without an ounce of irony. While the whole ‘hard-working band’ motif can get a bit cliché, the Sydney four-piece mean it when they say it’s been busy. “We started the year sort of getting all of our songwriting finalised and all of our performing chops up to speed, because we were heading into the studio with full knowledge that we were working towards creating a really live-sounding album. And so we needed to get our performances really really solid, because no one wanted to be the one that, really close to the end of a perfect take, makes that mistake that sets the whole thing back to the start.

“So we were really frantically doing that, and then we got this invitation to tour with Dead Letter Circus and Karnivool on the Polymorphism tour, which came right in the middle of our rehearsals. So we couldn’t turn that down, because who the hell would turn that down?” Obviously, Wicks-Green is right. The Polymorphism tour breathed new life into the sometimes maligned world of Australian heavy rock, with a perfect line-up and shows that sold out within minutes. It put Karnivool back on the critically regarded map, reminded everyone of how much power Dead Letter Circus are willing to convey on stage, and finally let audiences outside the diehard sleepmakeswaves’ fanbase know that these humble guys could put on one of the best live shows you can pay money for in this country.

“We jumped on that, played these awesome shows with these awesome dudes, headed back for more frantic rehearsals,” Wicks-Green continues. “And then recording, which was awesome, and then touring Europe, then it was prep for the album launch, and now we’re on tour for the album.”

Said new album Love Of Cartogrophy has just been released, and it’s deep, loud, eclectic and impactful, carrying with it an intense sense of cohesion that has become a sleepmakeswaves trademark. Extending on some themes from …And So We Destroyed Everything, but throwing more out the door at the same time, the sophomore effort sees the band opting to leave their comfort zone a little more.  The first track from the album, Something Like Avalanches, was picked up by none other than Richard Kingsmill on 2014, and let everyone know that the electronic side of sleepmakeswaves, always there but under the drive of guitars, was going to be a stronger element this time around.

“The electronic element has always been a big part of the band,” Wicks-Green says. “Alex [Wilson, bass] is the real driver behind that, and I think a combination of getting to meet one of our biggest influences, 65daysofstatic, on tour last year and learning about what they do, and Alex’s own growth in his programming – as you do when you’re kind of dedicated to something – enabled more experimentation and focus with how those sounds work in our songs. And also just the kind of music we were writing lended itself to more of that. It’s more upbeat, and so songs like Something Like Avalanches just really suit bringing that stuff in and making it more of a focus, because you can develop all sorts of interesting beats and clicks, and that’s something that bands like 65daysofstatic are so good at, driving songs along rapidly with those elements. That was a really fun side to this writing.

“Looking forward to the future, I think we’re definitely going to bring in more instruments. We have some plans to bring some more keys and synths in to the songwriting, whenever the next songwriting phase might be. At the end of the day, though, we’re a bunch of dudes who grew up listening to heavy metal and grunge, and we hope we can kind of keep that element there and just kind of experiment around the edges a bit.”

As well as the effort that went into constructing an album that met their own expectations and goals, sleepmakeswaves concurrently decided that going with major label distribution was not what they wanted. Sticking with longtime label Bird’s Robe, the band started a Pozible campaign for Love Of Cartogrophy.

“Crowdfunding you have to be very careful with, because you never want to come across as being cavalier or flippant with your fan’s hard-earned money,” he says, “so we thought really carefully about whether or not we wanted to go down this route. But we knew we wanted to make the absolute best album we could make, because we think three years is enough time to be ready for that. We had some really big ambitions for it, and by ourselves we were able to scrabble up about half of what we needed. So we knew we needed to do something different.

“I think the way the music industry is going, crowdfunding platforms are going to be more and more important as record sales become less of a source of revenue,” Wicks-Green continues. “Especially in the indie scene, it’s just an amazing vehicle, because it includes so many aspects of making a record. There’s something special about bands directly reaching the people who want to support them. You know, reaching out and going, ‘Hey, here’s our plan, here’s some cool rewards, and here’s where you can help us out if you want to.’ And then we exceeded the target, which was amazing. We got to make the record of our dreams in the way we wanted. You can’t ask more than that. We just hope people love it as much as we do now.”