UK four-piece Wild Beasts have a style that is particularly hard to pin down.
Calling them simply ‘indie rockers’ is perhaps doing them a disservice after four albums that have taken them from one side of the spectrum of intense rock through to more restrained pop-rock and back again. Now they’re ready to release their fifth studio album Boy King, a record that frontman Hayden Thorpe says has shocked the members of the band just as much as it will surprise audiences.
“If we’re doing our job right, we’ve got to shock ourselves,” he says. “I didn’t think we had this kind of record in us, to be honest – it wasn’t something I envisaged doing. Once you took the leash off, it went crazy. We’ve played these songs once live and what was apparent was that they are such larger-than-life tracks, written to make us bigger than we are – to try and transcend ourselves.”
Thorpe sees Boy King as Wild Beasts’ most powerful work to date, and one that will take them a little while to get used to playing live. “The music is more powerful than we will ever be, so when it comes to playing our songs live we definitely have to own them and grow into them, otherwise they just don’t translate,” he says.
On first listen, the new record seems to have more raw emotion than their last couple of albums. Thorpe says there was certainly an effort by the band to rediscover a freedom and emotion that had been present in the early years. Since then, he says, the process had become too mathematical, and Wild Beasts had reached a point where there was an imminent desire to bring back the rawness.
“Our music had become meticulous, it was like architecture in music. It was made with such microscopic detail that we felt that it was becoming more like maths in music, and we thought we could either continue down that path, or don the leather jackets and bring the chaos of rock’n’roll. Therefore we embraced the teenage us again, our teenage selves. When you do that, you really start to make music with the lightness and freedom of people who have nothing to lose. So that’s the backdrop to why the record is different, because it was made with the looseness and freedom of guys who have nothing to lose.”
Part of the reason Thorpe and the band are so proud of this record is that they’re now in a place where they’re not worrying too much about the consequences of what they’re creating. “In my 20s I was always tearing my hair out worrying about my musical output, my legacy as it was, and they’re hard things to carry around,” Thorpe says.
“There is a peace with the chaos as you get older – you realise that you’re survivors. I feel like we’re survivors – we’re making our fifth record. I guess you realise, ‘Maybe I am that guy who is just offering his music up to the universe and maybe I don’t have control.’ That was the main leap I had personally, knowing that I’m not in control of this and that’s OK. I think it takes a blind leap to make any record. It takes an unfathomable amount of superstition and belief to get it together.”
Despite being more than happy to once again be making music that’s imbued with freedom and emotion, Thorpe doesn’t have any regrets about any of the albums in the Wild Beasts discography. His main concern with his own and other people’s music is that the art and creativity must always come first, and not be ruled by the commercial side of the deal. “My belief is that good art makes a good business,” he says. “But it has to be that way around – good business makes terrible art.”
After an unanticipated writing session with Disclosure’s Guy and Howard Lawrence, Wild Beasts were taken aback by how passionate those artists were about making music that genuinely connects people. Thorpe and co. were initially contacted by the Surrey hitmakers, and they jumped at the chance to hang out.
“We had a meeting with them and what was very apparent is that they are very, very good at what they do, and what they do resonates with people very much,” says Thorpe. “When you have that combination you have a force of nature, and it was a pleasure to see those guys wielding that force with such ownership and prowess.”
Wild Beasts’ own career stretches back to the early 2000s, when making yourself known as an artist was about putting as much of yourself into the music as possible – despite the lures of creating for the pure sake of making money. “We have to be pretty malleable as a musician nowadays,” Thorpe says. “You have to forgo a lot of the moral standards you felt you wouldn’t have to cross when you were coming up.”
Thorpe wouldn’t trade their early years for anything, though, and their original mentality still guides what the band has become today. “We were listening to music pre-internet and made our first record pre-recession. So I guess we had that old-fashioned sense of what our jobs entailed, which is still in us. Having said that, the survival instinct and the need to make it work means you’ll do what you have to do. I think it’s a really interesting time for music at the moment. It doesn’t matter who the curator is, it doesn’t matter who the philanthropist is signing the cheque. What matters is that the record has been made.”
[Wild Beasts photo by Tom Andrew]
Boy King by Wild Beastsisout Friday August 5 through Domino.
