alt-J Interview

Wondering about the new album ‘This Is All Yours’ read our alt-J interview to find out how they’ve changed since ‘An Awesome Wave’.

alt-J have seen international success since their debut album ‘An Awesome Wave.’ The pressure was on the band to create an equally successful LP and they faced great changes when they went from four members to three at the beginning of the year, but in the face of adversity their second studio album ‘This Is All Yours’, has become a success. We catch up with Gus Unger-Hamilton to find out more about their new release and working with Miley Cyrus.

Gus is currently at a house party in East London when we catch him on the phone, and state that he sounds like he’s enjoying Bank Holiday Sunday in England. His plucky and friendly manner exudes as he continues to reel with excitement about the imminent release of the second album, “Yeah [we’re] super excited. We finished the album at the end of May, so we’ve basically had to sit on it. We’ve already been waiting for three months for it to be released. And we just can’t wait. We just can’t wait!”

Explaining how they have grown up and changed since ‘An Awesome Wave’ he explains in detail. “I think we’ve got a bit better at song writing. I think we learnt a lot from An Awesome Wave, and from going on tour. We toured for two years, we got to know our instruments really well. We probably played our instruments more in those two years, than we have in our entire lives. So we came to make a second album as much more competent musicians and with more of an idea about what we could get away with.” Harking back to their previous album, he continues, “An ‘Awesome Wave’ was quit a kind a colourful album, we weren’t really sure if all the mixes of styles would really go down well in just one album, and people might have been like ‘What the fuck is this?’ and then it went down well and we thought ‘Fuck it!’ we have a listenership that is up for being challenged, let’s challenge them again. That’s the really nice thing… the freedom.”

Alt-J’s new album opens with the track ‘Nara’ which Gus explains is a city in Nara where deer can roam freely, he elaborates on the meaning of the song. “…the idea is the song is quite a political song and it’s about gay marriage and how they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and if they love each other, they’re not hurting anybody . It’s about a man who wants to marry another man, and just saying like ‘Why can’t I be like a deer in Nara and just get on with whatever I want to do without people telling me what to do?”

The first release from the new album ‘Hunger Of The Pine’ features a sample from Miley Cyrus’ ‘4X4’ which instantly sent shockwaves through their fan base, but Gus explains how the unlikely collaboration came to be, “Basically Miley had become a fan of ours and she tweeted us, then Tom sort of talked to her on Twitter and asked her if she wanted him to do a remix for her, she said yes. So we got friendly with her. Tom did a really sick remix of her, and he had all the stems from the song 4×4 on his computer, so when we were writing ‘Hunger Of The Pine’ we were playing around with the samples of stems on his laptop and chucked it in. And then we went to Miley’s show and met her and asked if we could use the sample and she was like ‘Yeah of course’. So it was a really natural, little chilled out collaboration. Which was really nice.“

It’s clear from the new album that alt-J have included tonnes of musical influences, and one song we have to ask about is ‘Left Hand Free’ which almost sounds like a reference to Donavan’s music of the 60s. Gus explains how they managed to pen the track in just 20 minutes. “That song was written really quickly. Joe had this guitar riff like ‘doing – du-du-du-du-dun, dum-du-du-dum-dum-dum’ and he’d been playing for a few years, and not really doing anything with it, and we were just like in this session for the album, having fun and jamming. We were probably quite high at the time. And I was like ‘Have you got any lyrics to that?’ and he quickly wrote down some lyrics on the fly and we started playing it, and literally within 20 minutes we had the song. And that’s really unusual for us to write songs that quickly. It’s us having fun. The song is an idea of a bar brawl in prohibition, a speakeasy bar in the 30s, so we’re all playing our instruments in this very fun alt-J way. Tom’s doing drum fills, I’m doing an organ solo, Joe’s lyrics are very like corny but it’s just a really fun song. We were like that doesn’t sound anything like our music but we fucking love it let’s record it.”

By Hannah Shakir
@hanshak