Odds & Ends

Individually we all have roots in music here and there. Some of us started playing music before having a full set of teeth, and some of us started a little later. We all met while studying music at university and formed a band there; Some of our stuff is still recorded there and we love coming back to our roots.

Straight out of the tour with Skram we dove into the studio to record the Drums for Better Days. At this point we already had pretty decent guide tracks to give our drummer, Max Earnshaw, a really good energetic mix in the headphones, with the idea that it would make Max play more energetic as well. We then made those drums sound even better with some nice plugins and even nicer outboard hardware, and Jonathan Meyer tracked the bass simply directly into the pre-amps. After that, guitarist and singer Koen Aldershof layered about 4 different guitar parts over multiple tracks, to get that popular indie-pop-rock sound, similar to Half-Alive, Grizfolk, Great Gable, The Happy Fits; the list is endless.The gang vocals in the chorus are what really makes this song stand out for us. It was quite fun, we asked our Instagram following if anyone wanted to sing along on our new single and we had an overwhelming response. We had a lot of musical and non-musical friends and followers sing along to the chorus lyrics “Higher and higher and higher” which created this huge wall-of-sound kind of vocal effect. It really sounds like there’s a small army of people singing and shouting the key song lyrics. Phew, so the song is done, recorded anyway, and in only 3 weeks. At this point we sent the song off to our previous lead guitarist and good friend Luan Meaker who mixed the song beautifully. Chris Chetland from Kog Studios, (who’s worked with some ridiculously amazing artists) mastered the single and in our opinion, the song is one of the best ones we’ve ever produced.

The recording of Better Days actually came about super quickly. We were a little pressed for time, not to mention exhausted, coming out of the tour across the North Island if we wanted to push a single out before the end of the year. We thought, it’s better to release it in November because as soon as December rolls around, nobody is going to listen to anything but Mariah Carey’s jingle bells. So we got stuck in, the way we always do, starting with drums first. If anything, we put less pressure on this single than we have done for previous tunes and I think it made for a really easy and relaxed way of getting the recording done.