The Band Explains: Hope & Social - 'Sunrise Laughing'
Leeds DIY outfit Hope & Social talk to us about the ideas behind their bright and jovial single 'Sunrise Laughing'.
'Sunrise Laughing' is taken from the band's 5th studio album ‘Feel’ which is out now and comes with a fun and quirky animated video directed by Virpi Kettu (lead animator, Radiohead - Burn The Witch).
'Sunrise Laughing' is taken from the band's 5th studio album ‘Feel’ which is out now and comes with a fun and quirky animated video directed by Virpi Kettu (lead animator, Radiohead - Burn The Witch).
"'Sunrise Laughing' was the last song to be written for the album and came pretty quickly in the end. It started life as a crap demo of the verse on my phone with the standard Garage Band pizzicato strings on it. I’d had a few days of messing about on the new Garage Band on the iPhone and one verse for this song was the sum total of the fruit of my labour. Anyway, we started work on it as a band and it soon developed way beyond that with us throwing pretty much everything we had at it.
The week before we started work on this song we’d made a pretty random impromptu purchase of a plastic brass instruments for everyone in the band. We have a long standing ambition of forming our own street band and this put us one step closer. Most of the time we should have been making the album better we were having “lessons” from James to try and master just a handful of notes. We eventually ended up using these (along with a number of school groups) on the middle section of the song. Lots and lots of fun.
As for the lyrical content…well it’s just another scream into the void. Another holler at the madness of the it all in 2016.
Oh, and the strings off the iPhone remained in the final mix.
For the album we decided to circumnavigate the usual conversations about which song to choose for a video and asked 9 video makers to make 9 videos, one for each song. Virpi applied to be one of the artists and we were absolutely blown away with what she produced for 'Sunrise Laughing'. There’s a lot of hours in that 4 minutes of video and it fits the songs perfectly. And the kids like it…that’s what counts the most these days."
Feature by Karla Harris.