Band Of The Week #0083 - Another Sky
This week’s Band Of The Week is London based Another Sky, who have just released their EP ‘Life Was Coming In Through the Blinds’, which is out now via Fiction Records. We had a chat with the band about the creative process of the release and their plans for the future.
Where was the EP recorded? Any behind the scenes stories?
Some of it in our bedrooms, some of it at The Pool in London and some of it at Chale on the Isle Of Wight. When we recorded Apple Tree at Chale, we wrote it as we were recording it, live and in one room. I (Catrin) was suffering from really bad insomnia and had a bit of a meltdown, so didn’t realise Apple Tree was a great song until weeks later.
The songs were all produced by yourselves, what made you decided to do that and not get someone else in to produce it?
The final mix was done by Rik Simpson, how did that partnership come about?
It hasn’t felt like a decision because we’re so used to producing ourselves from the beginning anyway. We’re open to working with producers, but it’s hard to give up control over the files! The writing is collaborative, so naturally it feels good to produce collaboratively as well. We approached Rik after finding out he mixed Immunity, by Jon Hopkins. He’s also massively involved with Coldplay. He loved the band enough to say yes.
You have mentioned that the writing process for this release was done different compared to previous releases, how so?
We lost our rehearsal space. We used to rehearse at Goldsmiths, then at studio I worked in. When that studio closed down, we used our bedrooms. Our writing morphs to emulate the room we’re practicing in. We can hear whether a song came from Goldsmiths, Dalston or our bedrooms. We wrote ‘The Cracks’ and ‘Life Was Coming In Through The Blinds’ in our bedrooms and had to work backwards. Figuring them out live came last.
The lyrics in this sound personal, what have you drawn upon for inspiration when it comes to writing the songs?
Up until now, I have been writing songs mostly from this weird anonymous omniscient entity, using words ‘we’ and ‘you’, as a way to never admit ‘I’ feel a certain way. I have found it so difficult to write in first person. Something in me changed last year, though. ‘Life Was Coming In Through The Blinds’ is about feeling like a secondary character in my own life. Two exes told me I shouldn’t really do music, one even said at least his Mum wouldn’t mind though, because women don’t need ‘real’ jobs. A year after we got one, I woke up in bed one day and thought, ‘Holy shit. We have a record deal’. I’d been waiting for everything to crash down and end because I had internalised so much. Even when good things were happening, I was waiting for it to go wrong. ‘Life Was Coming In Through The Blinds’ is about realising nothing was going to crash down, that nothing is the end of the world besides the actual end of the world.
‘I Don’t Hate You’ is about watching my friend go through similar situations, years later, and understanding I had this chance to be the person I needed when I was younger.
Do you have a favourite song on the release?
‘Life Was Coming In Through The Blinds’. It just sounds so different to anything we’ve done before and we got this special electric feeling when we wrote it.
Now it is out there, what next? What are your plans for the next few months?
We’re working on the album, we promise! We’re playing lots of festivals and building up to our big headline show on the 24th September, Village Underground.
LIVE DATES:
July
19 Latitude Festival, Beccles
20 Tramlines Festival, Sheffield
21 Bluedot, Cheshire
August
10 Winterthurer Musikfestwoochen, Switzerland