Keeping It Simple

"When it came to writing them we just wanted to keep it fast. ‘No songs over a minute’ was pretty much [decided] the first day we jammed.” And so it came to be that TRS – or The Rat Soup (“We stole the name from Black Sabbath, they’ve got Rat Salad, so I was like, ‘Hey, Rat Soup, it’s an entree dish!’”) – have got a debut album, titled Better Out Than In, with 18 songs and an 18-minute run time. “It’s a loose guideline, the way all our styles came together like that. It can be tricky – you don’t want everything sounding the same. If you write a bunch of songs that are short, it’s pretty easy to use the same formula every time. It’s all good to put some catchy hooks in there, but having them so they’re short, they really stand out in the song and makes the song stand out. Coming up with so many hooks and melodies or just a catchy chorus or something, that can be tricky because you’re doing so many at once. We don’t write one song at a time, we write four, you know? It’s definitely different to writing a two-to-three minute song for a band.”

The band members are no strangers to this sort of approach. It was mainly just for a bit of fun. “No one’s trying to make a million bucks or anything, just play good, fun punk music. Everyone in the band’s been playing for a long time, just keeping the dream alive.” As such, the album came together pretty quickly. “We recorded it at home; it was just easier to smash it out at home in the band room. One of the guys in the band has a bit of recording stuff, a bit of his own thing going on, so yeah, DIY. We recorded it live and then relaid the guitar and bass tracks, then put the vocals over the top. A bit of cut and paste, a bit of old school. That style of music doesn’t need to be super over-produced or anything.”

That’s not to say it was all smooth sailing – writing and performing one-minute tracks poses its own challenges. “Yeah, remembering the lyrics... I sing in the band, and when it’s real fast like that and you’re spitting out so many lyrics – some songs are 40 seconds and it’s a full page of lyrics. Repeating myself would be easier but if you want to get better you have to come up with a couple of lines. For me, that was the biggest challenge, remembering all the words, but playing this music’s all pretty natural for us.”

That said, it does have significant advantages. “We’ve started writing our next record now, I think we’re six songs in. We’ve had two jams and we’re six songs in. There’s no high expectations so we’re like, let’s write some new material and keep on recording. We’re just gonna keep pumping and see what happens.”