Outlaw Kin

“It’s the second EP in what’s planned to be a collection of three,” keyboardist Aled Humphreys explains. “We don’t want to leave too much time between the EPs, so it’s really just been a case of workshopping the songs and saying, ‘Do we like it?’ Yep. Go!’ It’s been really quick-fire decision-making with the songs, just trying to get the best product from our time in the studio.”

Humphreys says that while the EPs are tied thematically, the band is still primarily interested in expanding sonically.

“The titles are based on a collection of short stories by an author called JG Ballard,” he continues. “Technically this is our third EP but it’s only the second in this trilogy – we just want to have something that we can put together as a collection at the end so we can say, ‘We’ve done this in two years’. Thematically there won’t be too much of a link between all three of them, but each EP is based on one concept. Josh [Tuck] our singer definitely follows a narrative from a lyrical perspective, but musically I think we’re just trying to develop the sound more and more as we go with an aim to become more professional-sounding.”

In purely musical terms, there’s a definite progression from the trilogy’s first instalment, The Embankment (2013).

“We’re getting better in the studio, and we’re getting better as our own producers as well,” Humphreys posits. “We try to focus a lot on the art and not worry too much about whether it’s fitting into a popular construct – we don’t direct the music towards the listener, we just try to make something that we really, really like. We’ve been together a long time and the energy’s starting to ramp up now because we’re hitting our stride in terms of music and songwriting. I certainly think that it sounds more professional than the previous ones.

“There’s certainly some common ground in what we all listen to, but then on the other hand our drummer Zander [Hulme] has a background in gypsy music and is currently working on a hybrid of music from the ‘40s and ‘50s combined with electronic music – it’s mental, we come from all different musical stock. I think we just try to stay as open as possible, because there’s so much to take from all of our different tastes and it’s exciting to blend them altogether and make something that doesn’t sound like absolute shit. We definitely try to stay open-minded, because we all have such different tastes and backgrounds. You can’t go in there with too much of a pre-conceived idea of how it’s going to end up, otherwise it stops being original. You’ve got to let it become what it’s supposed to become.”