Throw yourself into anything for long enough and you’re always at risk of the fun draining out a little.
After all, anything you work at is you know, work, and even a passion can become a pressure if you allow it to fester.
Such was the position that Warpaint found themselves in after the release of their critically and commercially acclaimed self-titled record. As anyone who has heard the band discuss the making of the album on the Song Exploderpodcast knows, the release came with its own set of challenges, and its distinctly more radio-ready sound turned the band into indie rock stars they were perhaps not yet ready to be.
So how do you fight the implications of your own success? According to bassist and vocalist Jenny Lee Lindberg, you hit reset. “When making this new record, I think everyone came back to the table with more of an open mind and the ability to let things flow freely and to give things time,” she says. “You’re trying not to intercept it. You’re just happy to sit on it for a bit, and hear what everyone else is hearing. Also, I think we all decided that we just had to pick our battles. It was about deciding on the things that you wanted to fight for.”
The result is Heads Up, a distinctly more upbeat record than Warpaint. A track like ‘New Song’ represents the closest the band has ever come to disco halls, a choice that Lindberg stresses was very deliberate. “I think the main thing we wanted to do was just make an upbeat album and bring some of the energy that we have in our live show to the album,” she explains.
The record was produced by Jacob Bercovici, a name that will be familiar to any die-hard Warpaint fans. After all, the industry veteran worked on the group’s very first EP, Exquisite Corpse, and getting Bercovici onboard was a deliberate – though not exactly straightforward – way of making the record-making process as smooth as possible.
“We have worked with him over the years on various things,” Lindberg says. “But in the beginning we wanted to produce the record ourselves. We were sort of torn. I was in favour of producing the record by ourselves, and so were the girls, but we thought about it and eventually we said, ‘You know what? Let’s just see if Jake’s available. He’s been there since the beginning, he knows us. It’d be really nice to work with him again.’ And he was super down, so that’s the way it happened … It was organic. Everything we do comes organically. We always have to enjoy ourselves.”
“Ourselves” being the operative word. Warpaint aren’t a one-person band, and they have no strict frontperson. They are a collective, an assemblage of musicians and songwriters who each have something different to bring to the table. Lindberg, for example, released her debut studio record Right On! late last year, and to hear her tell it, it sounds like the experience of going at it alone taught her what makes Warpaint’s collaborative writing process so unique.
“I’m the only person writing the music on Right On!,” she says. “There was only one perspective on that record. And I think that’s what’s a bit different about Warpaint. That’s what makes us unique, and what makes our sound pretty unusual. It’s hard to pinpoint what we sound like, because we’re four different people. Whereas Right On! sounds very much like me. If we were to make a Warpaint album with the Right On! songs they would probably sound totally different, you know?”
Though for many bands, writing as a team would be a very exhausting form of torture, resulting in more hurt feelings and battered egos than any actual songs, Lindberg stresses that the band’s long history together means they can communicate effectively when writing, and know when certain players might even need to take the back seat. “It’s definitely a collaborative process for sure,” Lindberg says.
“It’s always a collaborative process. Even if one person decides that they don’t necessarily need to play anything, then that’s still a person deciding that they don’t need to play anything. We never decide for each other. You know what I mean? Not everybody always needs to play something. That person will come to that decision on their own. Whenever we bring any song to the table, we’re not expecting everyone to necessarily play on it.”
The resulting record is one that brims with plain, old-fashioned goodness, and produces the kind of pleasure that you get when you hear an exceptionally tight band having fun. One could be fairly safe in positing that it is going to go down resoundingly well with fans and non-fans alike. But whatever the ultimate response may be, at this stage, Lindberg understands that it’s out of her hands. “I am excited,” Lindberg says. “I’m excited for it to come out, and then once it’s out, it’s none of my business what happens to it.”
[Warpaint photo by Mia Kirby]
Warpaint’sHeads Up isout Friday September 23 through Rough Trade.
