The Acid Interview

Combine the production skills of Steve Nalepa and Adam Freeland with the vocals of Ry X, and you get The Acid, a group with the potential to change everything you thought you knew about music. Releasing their debut album, ‘Liminal’ on 4th July, they’ve created a hypnotic 11-track body of work that can’t be pinned down by genre. With tasters of the album in the way of ‘Creeper’ and ‘Fame’, the three accomplished professionals prove their level of genius in the field. Overcome with anticipation and curiosity, we grabbed some time with Adam to discuss how it all began and why this project is particularly special.

Hi Adam, how are you?
Great! It’s a lovely, sunny day in Brighton.

In your own words, can you describe who The Acid are?
It’s Ry, Steve (Nalepa) and I trying to make something interesting. It feels like it’s something beyond the sum of the three of us. It seems to have pulled us together; we didn’t plan it, it felt like some kind of entity that had its own agenda. It sort of happened without a thought.

Would you call it luck or fate that the three of you happened to be in the same place at the same time?
I don’t know if I really believe in luck, but it was some kind of weird synchronised happening that you couldn’t have ever manufactured, which is what feels special about it. A certain magic happened… if that makes sense!

The result is the 11-track body of work, ‘Liminal’. With each of your backgrounds and The Acid EP to go from, were there expectations of how the album would sound?
I think that was the beauty of it – we never really had time to have expectations. We didn’t have a plan, we just got together and got weird really, that was kind of our motto! What’s been really refreshing about it is that it wasn’t trying to be anything. It was the opposite to how I’ve written anything in the past. We just wanted to make something that felt good.

With the three of you, how was the production process?
Ry does all the singing – I do a little bit of backing vocals, but very little [Laughs]. Ry is the voice, y’know and has a lot of experience as a songwriter. Steve’s like a studio nerd, he’s an amazing technician and very fast. And… I’m a bit of a studio nerd [Laughs]. We’re all quite accomplished in our craft which I think if we’d met at an earlier point down the line, we wouldn’t have been able to create so quickly. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘Outliers’, talks about how magic things happen and a lot of it is a combination of knowing what you’re doing and that magic factor of being in the right place at the right time, and when those things combine, that’s what makes it really interesting.

Being so accomplished and experienced, was it difficult to work with two individuals that were just as involved in the music?
There were moments where egos were challenged, for sure. But, there wasn’t a lot of time to mess about and argue. We had a rule that if two of us liked it, it stayed, and if two of us didn’t, it didn’t. That was how we were going to do it.

The sound you’ve created is atmospheric and really pulses through your body. If the sound of ‘Liminal’ was a world, what sort of world would it create?
Oh my God, that’s a big question. ‘Liminal’ is the sort of space between things, where one thing ends and another begins. It’s in this liminal state where the conscious and the subconscious meet. It would be a world in another dimension, that you couldn’t really see and there’s nothing tangible about it, you could just feel its presence.

As someone that toured non-stop for over a decade, were you keen to have a project to get your teeth into?
It was interesting because I took some time out, I’d been touring a long time as a DJ and I felt like where the scene was going was quite different from where I wanted to be. It was getting harder and noisier and there were shorter attention spans. To honour my own authentic creativity I just wanted to take a step back from touring and DJing and juts recalibrate. It was quite a gamble to do that – people were telling me I was crazy for backing off from a career I’d worked so hard on building. But the time I had was the best thing I ever did. I found a more interesting place within myself and was falling back in love with music again. It was after a year of not going on aeroplanes, which was a big deal! To meet Ry at the moment I did two days after I’d booked the studio with Steve, it felt like it was right. You couldn’t have planned it and to have tried to do this in the headspace I was in before, it would have been very different. I don’t think it would have worked.

Prior to the album’s release, the public have been able to hear ‘Creeper’ and ‘Fame’; what has the reaction been like?
I think it’s been good, amazing! I saw this as some kind interesting, underground thing. I wasn’t expecting it to connect on a bigger level. Because it’s kind of weird music!

Is that because of audiences’ styles and tastes changing?
It’s a combination of things – a zeitgeist. Although we weren’t trying to do it, it definitely feels like the right sound for this moment. It’s been nice because we haven’t pushed it – it was up on Soundcloud for eight months before anything, we didn’t tell anyone. In a world where everything’s crammed down your throat, we’ve gone the opposite and trusted it and let people discover it. Seeing the reaction from the live tour, people really love it.

Where have you toured so far?
London, Paris, Hamburg, Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam – we’ve literally done seven gigs ever and they’ve all been in the last couple of weeks. This summer we’ve got a lot of festivals around the UK and Europe, and we’re coming to Oz for Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay and we’re doing Sydney and Melbourne sideshows.

Our favourite track has to be the opener, ‘Animal’ for its rawness and melancholy. Do you have a personal favourite track off of the album?
I don’t know; I really like ‘Clean’, but it changes. It’s hard to be objective on your own music.

Do you do the music for yourself? Who do you make it for?
We just want to make art. I’ve tried making music to meet other people’s expectations in the past and it’s never worked. You have to create for yourself. My career as a DJ started by playing music no one was. There was no market for it, I just played records and I saw a demographic that dug it. When I became successful I started making things I was supposed to and they weren’t as good. I had that realization that you’ve always got to create for yourself. You can’t fake authenticity, that rawness. Also this record was written really quickly, so we didn’t have time to try and be something.

What was the length of time it took?
We did the EP in 10 days and then the rest of the album in about five or six weeks. It doesn’t happen like that – I’ve spent five or six weeks on one track before!

By Charlotte Mellor