The Maccabees' New Album Was Purposely Made For The Stage

Album number four for UK guitar band The Maccabees is a different beast — and it was always going to be. Marks To Prove It, with its more stripped-back, bare-bones sound, a fair step away from their Mercury Prize-nominated third cut, Given To The Wild — is, as frontman Orlando Weeks explains, an album of songs made for the stage.

And listening to it, you can see he's right. The songs build slowly yet end as behemoths, seemingly designed for a festival stage, after dark, big light show, anthemic. The reason? A direct reaction to the multi-layered, complex songs from this album's predecessor, songs that, while on disc, were complete, on stage became too much to handle. Marks To Prove It is the obvious artistic reaction.

"If one guitar can't do it, then one guitar and a piano, or one guitar and a saxophone."

"With the last record, one of the things it let itself down on was that some of the [songs] were just so layered and lush that when played live, they just seemed underwhelming, so we ended up having a backing track we played along to... playing to a click, it just didn't feel like we were playing as a band.

"So when we were a little way into the recording process with this record, we realised that this could be something that could help us put a bit of structure into what we're making, it needed to work in the room — if something didn't work with one guitar, on the last record we'd layer it and layer it and layer it... but on this one we thought, if one guitar can't do it, then one guitar and a piano, or one guitar and a saxophone or something. That became a bit of a rule of thumb."

The result is, as mentioned, a more sparse sound, songs that can be more faithfully replicated live, which is where the band truly shine. Another aspect in which this album differs from Given To The Wild, is in its ethos, so to speak, the way it "became about the night time, the inner-city stripped back, and about the band dynamic again," as guitarist Felix White says in the album's accompanying release notes.

"Yeah, more often than not, the stuff we agreed was working, worked when we played it back at night," Weeks concurs. "The stuff I was writing, and the music, they both informed each other, and how I pictured things... was more often than not, at night. It took care of itself, really."

As Weeks goes on to explain, this album was more about the everyday, the inner-city — real life. It comes across in his honest delivery, in the songwriting, as a whole.

The reception garnered by Given To The Wild has given the band confidence. "Yeah, that record [had us as] not just an indie band from London, but as a band," Weeks explains. "Not that we got taken more seriously, but we got to start again a bit, and it proved to ourselves that we could make something different to what we'd made in the past." And it's this confidence that in the end truly fuels Marks To Prove It.