Miami HorrorMiami Horror have spent the last three years living mostly in Los Angeles, drawing on its “weirdness and sunshine” for inspiration during the making of their second album, All Possible Futures. Producer and synth/bass player Ben Plant says that the move took some convincing, though.
“We toured through there a few times. I just wanted to live there for a little while; I was first thinking three months to a year,” says Plant. “Everyone else wasn’t that sold until we’d went through [LA] a few more times and then the other guys were like, ‘Nah, this is interesting, let’s do it.’ So it was just based purely around the fact that more than anything it’s a strange melting pot of people from all around America – just like the freaks from each town that don’t know what to do with themselves. And then there’s just the overall look of it... It just looked very cinematic and it inspired you because of all the colour and the light. We wanted to take that in and just live that lifestyle, that almost fantastical lifestyle.”
“There’s such a history of it, of great bands… the American dream and all sorts of things like that, that you get when you’re in California, hey?” adds vocalist/guitarist Josh Moriarty, who remained in Melbourne but went to LA a few months a year to work with the band. They ended up writing about two thirds of the album in LA and a third in Melbourne.
Plant had stated that the band wanted to creatively explore every direction they could go for All Possible Futures, and with swirling synth, party jams, soulful melodies, and sunny disco -op, the album covers a lot of ground. Is its title reflective of the band’s creative processes? “That’s one third of the reason [for the title],” says Plant. “The second would be that it’s open to interpretation and everyone can think something about it themselves, and the third one was more personal… I always think about every path in life and try to see the end result of every one, so it’s like, there is all these possible futures and you just have to pick which one you want and try to work towards it. It’s pretty obvious but it’s also kinda philosophical in the sense that you’re in control of that.”
“Are you, though?” says Moriarty. “You can steer your ship in that direction but if the wave takes you in the other, then there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Well, of course, if something really bad happens, but you can be in as much control as possible. It’s more just like the concept of it... Or the relationship stuff too; when I broke up with this girlfriend who I was madly in love with, suddenly all these people were telling me all these stories about how they broke up, how it happened, what they did after it, and it was like the same paths. It was like you could almost write a systematic book… like, turn to page 57 if this happened. I just saw all these patterns.”
