It’s been three years since Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers released their sixth album,Brill Bruisers.
This Friday, they unveil their seventh, Whiteout Conditions, ahead of tour dates in North America and Europe. Australia isn’t on the schedule just yet, but bandleader Carl Newman is keen to make it happen: “Anytime we can, I’m all for it!” he says cheerfully.
“It always takes us a while to do things – maybe because there are a lot of things that have to be done long-distance and I have a five-year-old son, which absorbs a lot of my time,” Newman says.
Still, that hasn’t prevented the band from trialling its new material for the road. “We just did some practice where we spent five days working on songs, and then we just did a radio session in Canada with CBC where we had to play a bunch of ’em in front of an audience,” Newman says. “That was great. It was sort of a trial by fire. It’s maddening but it’s good to get practice.
“I don’t live in Vancouver any more,” he adds. “So I don’t see my bandmates except when we play or rehearse. Kathryn [Calder] lives outside Vancouver and Neko [Case] lives in America and our drummer [Joe Seiders] lives in LA. Even the members that do live in Vancouver, they don’t see each other when we’re not playing. It means that when we do see each other we’re still friends, and it helps that we don’t tour an insane amount. When you’re touring for a few months at a time, that’s when you start feeling like, ‘Ugggh,’ and going out to dinner by yourself.”
Living and working in different cities hasn’t taken anything away from The New Pornographers’ creative process, as Newman insists. “Kathryn has a studio in her house because her husband’s a producer – he recorded the first couple of Black Mountain records. I can just say to her, ‘Hey, record some stuff,’ or, ‘I don’t really know what to do with the harmony here, can you think of something cool?’ And she’ll record something and send it back to me the next day.
“It’s kind of like, why do either of us have to travel when we have the technology to do it long-distance? And it also helps that I trust them.”
Still, nothing really beats time in the studio together. “Sometimes I want to get the band together just to get a cool skeletal arrangement,” Newman says. “We’ll play the songs like that and take them to the studio and start disassembling them and figuring out different things that we can do.”
One particularly new influence came from Seiders, who replaced The New Pornographers’ drummer of 15 years, Kurt Dahle, in 2014.
“Now that we have Joe, it’s the first time that we’ve felt the freedom to completely dismantle the drums,” Newman says. “The old drummer, I think, felt a sense of ownership about the drums, so now we thought, ‘OK, all bets are off – we can do anything we want with the drums.’ That was fun.”
Earlier this year, Newman told Noisey that the band had looked towards Krautrock as a major influence on the sound of the new record. However, on the eve of the album’s release, he isn’t quite so sure.
“Sometimes when people ask me, ‘What does this mean?’… I feel like, when you start talking too in-depth about what something means, it just sounds dumb,” he says. “[I was referring to] more the idea of Krautrock. It wasn’t like we stopped and studied it and listened to Neu! or Amon Düül II or Can. I just thought, ‘There’s a vibe,’ and I thought, ‘Let’s try and chase that vibe more.’ I couldn’t think of a record that had a Krautrock feel but still had lots of harmonies in it, so I thought, ‘Let’s try that.’”
The idea that The New Pornographers’ sound has become somehow more cohesive has been a talking point in recent press around Whiteout Conditions, and Newman for one is pleased about the feedback.
“That’s how I wanted it to be so it would be nice to think that I succeeded,” he says. “There was a sort of beat that I liked that a few of the songs have, and one way for me that this record is a bit different is that, going back to the idea of Krautrock, there’s a lot of repetition in those songs and we wanted to use more drones. Before, I think we just did whatever.”
Whiteout Conditions is out Friday April 7 through Concord/Caroline.
