The Long Road

“It’s been a pretty long, drawn-out process,” Ben Salmin, one quarter of White Avenue, admits. “We wrote almost all the songs about two years ago. We got into the studio in early 2013, so at the beginning of last year. It’s taken probably a whole year to get all the songs back fully mixed and mastered. We still haven’t got the songs pressed to disc yet, so we’re cutting it pretty fine.”

Fine it is, with the band’s official release gig coming up in a matter of days. “I think a lot of it has been inexperience on our behalf. Sure, a lot of it’s probably down to miscommunication between parties, maybe. But yeah, mostly it’s down to us being completely new to this whole process.”

What band hasn’t gone through that, though? As much as this scribe can throw encouraging words around, Salmin is coolly positive about the whole experience. “Y’know, we wrote these songs when we we’re like 17 or something, so it’s not necessarily the kind of stuff that we would write about now,” Salmin chuckles. “But we had the songs, we had them finished, so we thought, ‘Why not put them out there?’”

The resulting EP is something you’d expect from a bunch of kids into punk and grunge music, but with a definite message that White Avenue are capable of bigger things. The whole EP has a definite ‘00s grunge vibe, with second track, Without You, taking a lot from Silverchair’s Tomorrow, fitting, given the relative youth of the band. The connections continue, with healthy doses of Zeppelin, Kyuss and the band’s much-loved Red Hot Chilli Peppers thrown in for good measure. “Yeah yeah, that’s definitely the kind of stuff we were into,” Salmin says. “Well, still into really, but I think we feel comfortable enough to not just repeat what we hear. We have this EP, and we’re happy with it and everything, but it really feels like the last two years have just been a learning experience for us.”

It’s this humble attitude and apparent patience with the oft-maligned recording process that grants a certain amount of pose to Salmin and White Avenue. Chrysalis is the raw, imperfect result of a band finding their feet. Pleased, their thoughts are now firmly focused on the future. “As soon as we get this EP out, I think we’re gonna head back into the studio to start working on an album. Obviously we’ll be playing the EP through at the launch party, but hopefully we can let people hear the stuff we’re doing now as well.”