Hip To Be Triangle

"I think we all got closer together,” says keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton. “We realised if we were going to be a three-piece we couldn’t have any fractions in the band. It had to be the three of us being close together as three rather than, well, when there’s four of you, inevitably you’re going to be sometimes split off into two twos, so I think it was like, ‘Okay, we can’t have two against one,’ so probably it brought us closer together and made us try to agree on stuff more rather than disagree on stuff.”

Unger-Hamilton, singer and guitarist Joe Newman, and Thom Green on drums are what remains of Alt-J, the Mercury Prize-winning alt-rock band behind 2012’s An Awesome Wave. Minus departed bassist Gwil Sainsbury, they’ve crafted a follow-up record, This Is All Yours. Losing a band member, although Unger-Hamilton says it did not affect the band musically, shook up the band dynamic. It meant that on the new record they had to approach things differently, to find a new way of working together in order to make something worthy of release.

"We realised if we were going to be a three-piece we couldn’t have any fractions in the band."

“I think that, we probably, Tom and I, probably let Joe make more decisions. He probably is more opinionated than either of us, feels more strongly about things than either of us, so he probably takes the lead in a lot of the decision-making in the band now, whereas before Gwil and maybe me as well more stuck on our own, disagreed about things more. Whereas I think this time it was like, ‘Okay, maybe we can let Joe make more of the decisions.’ But equally I think the three of us are more like-minded; when there were tough decisions in the band to be made it was often Gwil who felt differently to the rest of the band.”

Sainsbury left the group in January this year as announced on Twitter: “With regret, Gwil is leaving alt-J. This is purely a personal decision and as our best friend we support him completely.” His reasoning, in the words of Unger-Hamilton, comes down to being “almost opposed to being successful”.

“[It was] just the whole lifestyle, really: it was the touring aspect, it was the music industry aspect, he didn’t enjoy doing interviews at all, he didn’t enjoy having to go out for dinner with people from the record label, he didn’t enjoy going on tour, he didn’t enjoy that kind of thing, having to shake hands with radio programmers after gigs and things. I think he just thought the whole thing was bullshit, which it sort of is, but I’m okay with that. We don’t have to do it too much. You’ve just got to play the game up to a point. The three of us still in the band understand that, he doesn’t feel like that, and that’s fine.

“We definitely would feel the same way as him on occasion. Obviously sometimes you finish a gig in the middle of a really long tour and you’re tired after the gig and you just want to be by yourself and then suddenly you’re presented with the head of the station for the local radio station in your dressing room and they don’t leave. Everybody feels that, like, ‘Oh my god, please fuck off.’ I think overall we’re quite understanding people and we’re quite friendly people and we enjoy going on tour, we’re okay with meeting people like that, because ultimately they’re playing our records and so we do have to be nice to them because they’re largely responsible for the success we’re having. I think Gwil was never really about success, he was almost opposed to being successful as a band in a way. We were sort of thinking, ‘Well, I’ve got to go shake hands with this guy and have a chat to him and whatever but that’s okay because frankly, if his radio station hadn’t been playing our track we wouldn’t have sold out this massive venue in this town.’ I think Gwil was sort of thinking, ‘Well, I’m not interested in selling out the venue in the town.’”

Nonetheless, Sainsbury’s departure got the band thinking: where would they go from here? Instead of feeling that oft-talked-about second album pressure, they were traversing a very different territory.  

"He didn’t enjoy doing interviews at all, he didn’t enjoy having to go out for dinner with people from the record label, he didn’t enjoy going on tour..."

“I think having Gwil leave the band just before we started this album, that was the main event, it wasn’t just thinking, ‘Okay, time for a follow-up to the Mercury Prize-winning album.’ It was like, ‘Right, we’ve got to figure out what to do now we’re a threesome.’ That was much more in our minds really than any pressure.

“We’re quite confident in what we do. I think we knew if we were going to release a second album it would have to be good enough. We knew that we weren’t going to put out a sub-standard second album. If we’d not been able to write a good album we just wouldn’t have done one.

“I think before starting the album we were all pretty worried. We knew we had to do it quite quickly and it was like, ‘Shit, have we got enough music for this?’” But then once they got their teeth into it, it was “smooth sailing”.

They headed into the studio in January with the album semi-written and the deadline the end of May in mind. It was then that the album had to be fully finished and mastered. And even though, thanks to their success, they could’ve drawn upon all the bells and whistles, they chose to go low-key.

“We recorded it with the same producer [Charlie Andrew] in the same small cheap kinda crappy studio. I think this album ended up costing about five grand more than the first album, which is basically nothing. And both albums didn’t cost very much to make for albums at all. We didn’t exactly turn on the cash just because it probably would’ve been available to us. We still got our lunch form the same sandwich shop across the road every day.

“It was partly a deliberate decision because we wanted to try and think about why the first album was good. We didn’t want to change things. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it kind of thing. The first album turned out really good so we thought let’s do it in the same studio with the same guy. And also I think in the band we’re quite frugal in some ways, we don’t want to just spend money just because we can spend money on things. We don’t need to be chauffeured to and from a really posh studio every day. We’re happy to go down to Brixton on the Tube and be pretty normal about it, that’s fine for us.”

Alt-J will be back in Australia in October for two headline dates, the Melbourne date being Newman’s birthday, before jetting off to North America. Then they return for Falls and Southbound festivals over New Year’s. Unger-Hamilton says he’s “pumped”.

“We first came to Australia in October 2012 and we’d never been there before ever as people and we did two shows, small shows, they both sold out, we had some of the most memorable receptions we’ve ever had in both cities. We played Oxford Art Factory and um, a place somewhere else, I can’t remember, somewhere in Melbourne with a kind of saucy name [Ding Dong Lounge], I can’t remember what it was. Both those shows were incredible. Fans were unbelievably keen and we were like, ‘Shit, this is amazing.’ We never knew if we had any fans in Australia, so we’re always excited to come back, and it’ll be really wicked.”