STACK June 2017 Issue 152

68 / 93

Upon announcing her
new album, Lorde
said that if her debut
Pure Heroine was about
sanctifying her teen years,
this month’s Melodrama
is the “new world.” The
New Zealander’s first
two singles gave us the
pillars that this new world
sits on: the pillar of fire
is the thumping Green
Light, which has some awesome
similarities to Alanis Morissette’s
classic You Oughta Know (compare
LONDON
GRAMMAR
English broodsters London Grammar got
our attention with the soaring Hey Now
back in 2013; now the trio are back with
Truth Is A Beautiful Thing (TIABT), a personal,
11-track voyage through the band's lives
since their debut four years ago ( If You Wait).
According to guitarist Dan Rothman, this
album’s songwriting process was a lot more
cohesive than in the past.
“The songs generally come from different
places, which is definitely what happened on
the first album, and that was good,” he says.
“But I think for this one our roles became
slightly more defined, and because of that
we were more regimented
on this record – we were
more settled into a process
on this one.” He laughs that
they may have fallen in to
too much of a routine, and
adds: “I think if anything we
were maybe too settled –
we should probably throw
that out the window and
mix it up again for the next
record.”
The first single from
TIABT was released around
the world on NewYear’s
Day – when, of course,
no one was at their desks
Lorde’s “I wanna scream the truth,
she thinks you love the beach,
you’re such a damn liar” to Alanis’s
“Does she know how you told
me you’d hold me until
you died… but you’re still
alive?”).
The other pillar is the
gently climbing rose of
Liability, in which the
protagonist is repeatedly
told her petals are too
bright and her thorns
too sharp – but she
derives strength from
herself and continues her
ascent. Ensure you don’t miss the
second full-length from the young
powerhouse, out this month. ZKR
ready to rave about it. Rothman said this was
very much a conscious decision from the
group.
“We were still tinkering with our album
at that point,” he says. “I think I knew –
and it always seems to be me – I knew
we needed to put something out, ‘cause
otherwise we would just go mad. We made
the decision to release new music
on January 1, which was a great
idea in some ways because it was
a really interesting time to release
it. But from a press point of view, it
was terrible, because no one works
during that time – literally no one
wrote about it, or gave a sh-t, but I
think that was nice – in a way it was
like the antithesis of trying to do it
with a big song and dance.”
This record’s heavier tones find
their progenitors in film soundtracks,
with Rothman naming big guns
Hans Zimmer and Philip Glass as influences.
He and lead vocalist Hannah Reid also have a
shared interest in Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder.
“Me and Hannah were listening to a
soundtrack by Eddie Vedder – Into The Wild,
a film that we like, and one we just happen
to really like the soundtrack to. It’s got a bit
INTERVIEW
of a country influence thing, which you can
kind of hear on the record as well.” There’s
a touch of electro in there, too. “We were
really interested in electronic music and
techno music, as well as being obsessed
with Radiohead,” Rothman says. “We
just melded them all together as best we
[could].”
The English trio have always
enjoyed a strong and committed
fanbase Down Under; Rothman
attributes a good portion of the
reasoning behind that to our
national youth broadcaster, triple j.
“They have just been so ridiculously
supportive of music,” he says. “They
were playing our music before
anyone else in the world – they
were the first radio station to play
Hey Now, they were literally playing
it from a rip from the internet.
They’ve been playing our new music
too, and supporting it really strongly, which
is great. We have a huge thanks to them for
that.”
Aside from that, his theories on why
Aussie ears love London Grammar reveal a
real interest in our home-grown artists. “I
don’t really know; Australia has a sound that
has come from over there,
it’s influenced by sort of
trip-hop sounds from the
‘90s, which were quite
popular there. You can hear
it in artists like Flume, Nick
Murphy [Chet Faker], and
Lorde – well, she’s from
New Zealand, but other
artists from the area as
well. I suppose maybe we
fit in in that sense; it’s that
electric/acoustic crossover
thing that perhaps has
more influence there than
it does in other parts of
the world.“
Truth Is
A Beautiful
Thing by London
Grammar is out
June 9 via Dew
Process.
06 JUNE 2017
continued
visit MUSIC NEWS
Melodrama
by Lorde is out
June 16 via
Universal.
Words Alesha Kolbe
LORDE