Playtime Starts Now

It seems the members of Toy are hard not to like, and that likeability is translating into big things. Everywhere they go, people are singing their praises as the relatively young band moves from success to success, including their well-received self-titled debut, which dropped late last year. The organist for post-punk icons The Horrors, Rhys Webb, even singled them out as his favourite band for 2012. But, because they're good mates, Toy's bassist, Maxim 'Panda' Barron, says they don't feel any pressure following the rather public endorsement.

“We've known each other for about six years now. When we first moved to London, when we were 18, we met them when we were just going out, and we became really good friends, and we've stayed good friends – we see each other all the time,” Barron says. “Just from going out and partying and hanging out, basically. They helped us along. It's nice when your friends support you. But we've got some other friends in London now who are really good that we're trying to do the same for. It's just nice to show support to your friends.

“It definitely helps when your mates are in a good band and they think that your band is cool and they want to help out. When we started, we kind of played for us, and for our friends as well – it was just a fun kind of thing for us. I guess the more nerve-racking thing is when you're outside of that, and you end up doing something like the Vaccines tour, where the crowd aren't necessarily your friends or people that you'd think would get it.”

“The Vaccines tour” of which Barron so casually made mention is in itself an achievement, and not one they achieved through any kind of nepotism, having played in front of a crowd 20,000-strong at the famed O2 Arena just this past month. “It's the biggest show that we've ever done,” Barron enthuses. “It was a really fun thing to do. It was really cool. It was nice to play to lots of new people, you know. We kind of didn't know whether it was going to work on a larger scale – we haven't played stages that big before – but it actually worked really well. It was really good on a big stage. The O2's kind of like a big dark arena, so it's kind of like playing into space – you're spacing out a bit. It was really cool.”

It should not come as a surprise then that Toy's music translated in front of an arena crowd, given their style of layered, dynamic psychedelic rock flourishes stronger the more atmosphere it is allowed. Though is psychedelic even the right word for it?

“It's kind of a loose term, I think,” Barron muses. “There are lots of things that we like about psychedelic music, and we like making things that sound kind of … I guess you could say 'psychedelic', but it's not really the aim to make it psychedelic, I think it's just to make it kind of … weird, I think is a better term. Weird rock. Well, we like a lot of that kind of music, and I think that it's the closest thing you could compare us to. A lot of bands that get called psychedelic rock, and I guess we like quite a few of them, you know?”

Weird rock, it could be argued, is possibly even less explanatory a term than psychedelic. But as far as Barron is concerned, it suits Toy's needs to a T. “We're experimenting with some weird stuff, like … theremin, and lots of weird sounds and stuff, as opposed to just straight-up playing guitar,” he explains. “I guess it's the key to making something that sounds kind of otherworldly, and makes it feel kind of historic. It makes it feel a bit weird. And with experimenting … well, we've just been in the studio the last couple of weeks making our next record. We've been doing a lot of experimenting with all kinds of different stuff that makes weird noises, which is cool. We've gone back in with the same producer [Dan Carey] we had for the first record. We've got four more tracks to do and then we've got another record on our hands, which we're really excited about.”

As if they weren't accomplished enough. Still, the second, as-yet-unfinished album capitalises on Toy's strengths as a live act in a way that their debut could not. “We did the first one really quickly – we tracked it in about five days – and this one we played all live together in the same amount of time, but we've been given a bit longer to kind of explore different stuff; we've had more time to add those couple of touches, and had more of a chance to experiment,” Barron says. “I think the feeling of the song is portrayed through everyone playing together – you get swells, and it feels more like one entity, and I think it gets across a bit more. It's a nice, accurate, honest thing – the thing we like doing best is playing live, so it works better doing it like that. And Dan is really good at capturing that live, amazing magic that you get from playing together.”

Australian audiences will get to experience that magic, too, as the band make their first trip Down Under courtesy of the recently initiated Bulmers Underground movement, which sees the cider maker inviting up-and-coming British bands to Australian shores. As expected, Toy has friends in this corner of the world, too.

“We're really looking forward to coming over,” Barron says. “We've actually got some friends in Australia, who I think are going to DJ for the whole tour. Just a couple of friends of ours, and there's a couple of bands out there that we've met and are now friends with. We're really looking forward to it. No one in the band's been before, so we're really excited about it. We don't really know what to expect.”

Regardless, Barron is confidently hopeful Toy's tunes will resonate with local audiences as they have with their British fans, not least of all because, for them, love is most definitely a two-way street.

“I think there's a lot of good bands and a really good music scene in Australia, and I think that we've kind of got similar traits, maybe, to some Australian bands,” he says. “We like a lot of Australian bands as well, so hopefully people feel the same when we go over there.

“It'll be a fun time, man. Hopefully it'll blow a few people's minds. We really enjoy playing live, and when you play live it's a bit different from the record. It's heavier and faster and a different sound, in a way, all joined up in a wall of noise that should be epic and sound really cool.”