Men Vs Machine

“It was shit,” McDonald states matter-of-factly. “We are under the pump, but I don’t think it would’ve been so stressful if we didn’t build up the last couple of months the way we did. We decided we were gonna put together an album, and then we booked a tour and a release date, had all the artwork ready to go and we hadn’t even started recording yet.”

That kinda sounds like doing everything backwards, but the Love Junkies had supreme confidence it was all going to work out. That is, until the inevitable technological catastrophe. “The computer shat itself straight after we finished tracking. We were touring that entire time as well, so the whole time we were back we were spending trying to fix the computer, or at least get the files off of it. I was editing off of laptops and stuff while we were away. So by the time we got back, it was just like, ‘Please let this be done.’”

Things also haven’t been made any easier by the band’s attempt to grow their own indie label, a process which has thrown up its own obstacles. “Coming into it, when we decided that we were gonna do everything on our own, we had no idea what we were doing,” Robbie Rumble explains.

“[But] we didn’t get all this equipment and suddenly go, ‘Yes, this is all going to work’,” McDonald adds. “It was more us just trying to work out if we were gonna fuck it all up or not. Working without somebody riding us and making shit happen, you know, it’s dangerous. But we knew that, and we knew we had to focus if we wanted to make something out of it.”

“Another thing was that we had very little time to record [2014 EP] Flight Test. We thought we had time to make the new album, but in the end, we didn’t,” Rumble shrugs. “So we had to track everything in four days and all that. But we did plan, we planned to take more time with it,” he clarifies. Planned or not, Blowing On The Devil’s Strumpet may just be the next step in The Love Junkies’ rock takeover.