Clap Clap Riot Pick Apart New Album 'Dull Life' In Track-By-Track

Kiwi surf rockers Clap Clap Riot have got their brand new third album, Dull Life, in hand and we got two of the lads — singer Stephen Heard and guitarist Dave Rowlands — to sit down and talk us through the album.

Give the record a whirl and check out their track-by-track below.

Rising In The Street

Before we hit the studio this was a fairly straightforward structure. The random noise and stabs we cooked up in pre-production developed into their own beast in the studio. To achieve the end we layered several noise guitars and synths. — Stephen 

Tired Of Getting Old

This song was great fun putting together and started taking shape when some Dr Dre drum sounds were referenced. We've just completed shooting the video for the song over in Japan which should be out at some point very soon. — Dave 

Help Me

This is a song about wanting to get away from it all, being stuck somewhere you don't want to be and dreaming of distant places. Our first song that we released from the record — one of our favourites to put together. — Dave

Dull Life

This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album and one that came the easiest from a writing perspective. We spent a lot of time in the studio to capture the right vibe and style of vocal delivery. It’s very different from a vocal perspective for us and one of our favourite tracks collectively. — Stephen

Arrows In The Night

This was done as one live take with minimal overdubs, there's some interesting mistakes that stuck within the recording that we particularly liked — we wanted to get a gritty Velvet Underground type of feel when we were putting it all together. — Dave

Four Hands

This track has a little edge of electronic production within it that we liked within the track, it started a little more neutral but Tom, our producer, had the idea to work on playing along with an old Roland drum machine which gave the song its interesting edge. — Dave

Crickets In The Grass

Also another track that came very naturally. It was originally written as something of a country singalong, very stripped back on acoustic guitar with a high and low octave vocal. We always wanted the bridge to open up and have a different feel from the rest of the song and utilised this by stripping back most of the instrumentation in place of layered keys. — Stephen

Curtis Pickett

Curtis was a washed up actor that we met in LA when we were over for our last record. He was 43 at the time and still chasing his dream of being the next big thing in Hollywood. He had just worked on a film called Milf that he was very proud of and told us about his work on CSI. We later got home and found out that his starring role in CSI was 'Photo Double - 1'. Here's a list of his work on IMDB. His portrayal of Morpheus is particularly enchanting. — Dave

Better Than You

This one started with a very polished pop vibe that took off once we introduced the clav. It's also not everyday you’re treated to a bass solo. — Stephen

Perfect Man

The only song on the album that uses a different time signature. It changed a lot from the original demo with different parts being swapped in and out. We developed an original bridge solo as the main guitar hook in the intro and post-chorus section. It follows a story about being in a one-sided relationship. — Stephen

Old Man Living

This is the slowest tune on the record with the majority of the song recorded live - probably one of the saddest songs we've ever produced with a focus on what we do when we get to the end of the road and find ourselves left alone. — Dave