The Band Explains: goldenbloom - (Great) Britain
Following on from their standout debut EP "LOVE" from late last year, North West London upstarts goldenbloom return with another addictive slice of modern punk. We caught up with them to chat the track and their plans for the future.
Your video for ‘(Great) Britain’ is out now, which lyrically and tongue-in-cheekedly addresses a lot of miring themes regarding the UK. Can you speak any more to that and the track overall?
I'd written down this line on a lyric book I had. It said 'The world isn’t working anymore, what’s so great about it?' I thought it might eventually end up being a title for an EP or something later down the line but the statement alone had such prominence that I wanted to craft it into a song.
The lyrics came quite easily, which usually they take a few weeks to manifest but I feel like I had so much to say about our country and the current state it was in. It was sort of poking fun at what sort of a nation we'd become. Once this gigantic empire that's now this small timid island talking about the good old days and how great we once were.
Where was it recorded?
We recorded it at a studio in Woolwich called Saccharin. Harri who runs it - I think was away at the time and said we could use the room for a day so we grabbed as much gear as we could, got in as early as possible and just laid down tracks.
Any behind the scenes stories from the recording process?
Originally the song had heaps of swearing in it. We made the decision of the day we were doing vocals to pull those and rewrite most of the second verse to remove it. It's almost what a stereotypical British person would do. They wouldn't swear, they'd sort of dissipate the rage and just end up saying 'bollocks' or sighing loud enough that it's noticed.
We also ended up taking the picture for the album artwork the same day as tracking everything. There was a giant dog shit just out of the frame of the final cropped artwork which he had no idea until we started editing it together.
What do you hope your listeners take from '(Great) Britain’?
Well, I hope they stop reading the Daily Mail - but other than that - maybe see that we put out hard-hitting songs that actually have substance to them. Talking about ideologies that might actually affect them or that listeners can at least relate to.
Is it part of a bigger project? If not or if you can't say just yet, what can we look forward to from you next?
Originally we'd planned on doing another 3 track mini-EP. We had two songs ready to go when we started recording but (Great) Britain just sat miles ahead of the other one. It almost seemed criminal to hold it back until we wrote another two that could even compare so we decided it could go out alone.
I've been writing a lot since lockdown started. Mostly to keep sane, to try and get some of this pent-up angst out on paper. We'd love to get some more songs out before the end of the year for sure. I've hated not having anything to be excited about so I want to rectify that.