Issue 85 / February 2018

PREVIEWS
“If people hadn’t
donated money
towards the studio,
there’s a chance
Hookworms wouldn’t
exist now”
GIG
HOOKWORMS
Invisible Wind Factory – 23/02
The brightest talents in the UK’s
alternative music landscape
have spent the past three years
decanting an expanded, studioready
version of themselves into
their third album: the results are
mindblowing.
Any modern psych connoisseur worth their salt
will know of HOOKWORMS. The Leeds outfit
have taken the scene by storm ever since their
2013 juggernaut of a debut, Pearl Mystic. They
have proved themselves to be as ferocious live as they are on
record, selling out headline shows across Europe as they’ve
hurtled towards LCD Soundsystem levels of genre-straddling
brilliance.
As the years have gone on, the band have proved themselves
as more than just a meat-and-potatoes rock band and very much
an ongoing artistic concern. New album Microshift is as emotive
as the previous two albums, dealing with themes such as death,
heartbreak and even natural disaster; but the band’s third LP
has evidently given them more room for experimentation with
electronic elements, twisting their freeform sound pieces into
more standard song structures. Georgia Turnbull spoke to bassist
MB about the group’s reinvigorated approach on this record,
what caused this shift and how, without the help of fans, the
band might have ceased to exist.
Your new single, Negative Space, appears to show a significant
shift towards electronica, especially compared with The Hum.
What inspired this change towards sequences and loops?
I think it was to do with the gear we had at the time. When we
first started the band, we didn’t have very many instruments, and
all our gear was broken and a bit rubbish so we made do with
what we had. We’ve gained more equipment as time’s moved on
and we spent a bit more money on synths and other equipment.
It got to a point where we were using this stuff a lot more when
we were practicing and writing songs, and I guess it ended up
being the focus of the songwriting this time around. It happened
pretty naturally, to be honest, it wasn’t really an executive
decision that we all made. A couple of us do other things that
are more electronic so that fed back into Hookworms. It’s also a
continuation of things that were creeping in on The Hum: going
more electronic seemed like the obvious thing to do.
You’ve also said that this album is centered around the studio,
in regards to production and dynamic. How did the creation of
the album differ from the previous two?
With the last album, we had the songs completely written
and finished before recording live. There wasn’t a great deal
of thought [put] into post-production and making it fancy, we
just wanted to play the songs as we had written them. I guess
that was pretty much a straight rock record, whereas this time
around, rather than writing songs with us all in the room together
at once, we recorded little ideas here and there and dug them
up over a period of two or three years, using the computer to
piece things together. There are definitely some songs where we
used the computer as more of a tool and an instrument. And we
improvised a lot more, listening back and picking out short sound
bites. It was a cool and different way of working.
There are also collaborations on Microshift from the likes of
Richard Formby [producer of Spacemen 3 and member of The
Jazz Butcher], Christopher Duffin [XAM Duo] and Alice Merida
Richards [Virginia Wing]. How did these collaborations come
about and how was the experience of working with musicians
outside of Hookworms?
It was a really fulfilling experience because, other than a friend
on the first album who played a really small trumpet part, we’ve
never had anyone else involved in the band, and never had any
other artistic input. Richard’s one of our friends and we talked
about doing something with him before, so we set up in the
studio with him and just jammed. I think we recorded an hour and
a half of music, and then we worked back and edited it down. We
also did a live show with Richard where we improvised again,
and it all fed back into the album. Richard’s got a big modular
synthesiser and tape echoes that he uses, so we challenged
ourselves by working around that. I play with Chris in XAM Duo
and his other band have recorded with MJ [Hookworms vocalist
and chief producer] a few times, so it seemed obvious to get him
involved.
And then with Alice, we toured with Virginia Wing and I’ve
played on a couple of their records, so we’re really good friends
with them. With that, it was another different way of working:
we emailed her a demo we had and she sent it back with demo
vocals over that, which completely changed the direction the
song was going in. We rewrote it a little bit and MJ rewrote what
he was going to do, so working with her was collaborative in the
truest sense. We had a bare bones instrumental that she turned
into a bit of a pop song, and it might be my favourite track on the
album just because of how different it was putting it together.
The album has been described as a “euphoric catharsis”, the
music counteracting the lyrics dealing with the likes of death,
disease, and heartbreak. Would you agree that it’s euphoric
and cathartic, and did it feel that way when recording the
album?
Yes, definitely. The subject matter of the lyrics within some of the
songs is obviously quite dark, so I purposefully wanted the music
to juxtapose and counteract that, so the final outcome would be
heavy lyrical content with an uplifting, euphoric musical backdrop
so it wouldn’t become a really heavy album. We’ve always tried
to make the music cathartic and euphoric. I do think that the
way we build and write tracks has a lot more in common with
electronic and dance music than it does with rock, the way we
build stuff and drop it down, but again we’ve done it differently
this time around and that’s fed into this sound.
Microshift was fully recorded in your studio, Suburban Home,
that was devastatingly hit by the River Aire flood in 2015.
How you feel about the incredible response that followed, and
would you say the album became a response to the disaster?
Yeh, we’re incredibly thankful. If people had not donated money
towards the studio, I don’t think it would exist now, and there’s
a chance Hookworms wouldn’t have carried on either because
we can only do our music the way we do it because of our studio
space. We get to practice, record demos, write and record in
there, so if we didn’t have that space like that anymore, we might
struggle to function as a band. We can’t do what most bands do
and drive their equipment to practice once a week because of the
amount we have, so we need a static space like Suburban Home.
I don’t know if it was a reaction to the flood itself but having no
studio for six or seven months, then rebuilding it ourselves gave
us a kick and a spark to keep making the album. The flood caused
a massive delay to the album: Microshift has ended up coming
out six months later than we wanted, so when the second
studio was ready, we went full throttle on writing and recording
again. You’ve gone through all that effort, you’ve got to make it
worthwhile. !
Words: Georgia Turnbull / @GeorgiaRTbull
Photography: Hollie Fernando / holliefernandophotography.com
hookworms.website
Hookworms play Invisible Wind Factory on 23rd February.
Microshift is released on 2nd February via Domino Records.
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