Indie-pop duo Slow Club (Charles Watson & Rebecca Taylor) have released their third studio album Complete Surrender this month. Watson recently spoke to the Last Mixed Tape about how the band approached the new L.P. and their ever-evolving sound.
“I really like Paradise, but It’s a lot simpler and clearer this time around”. Watson says about Slow Club’s latest album in comparison to they’re previous release 2011’s Paradise. “We tried to resist just adding everything we could to the songs”.
Complete Surrender definitely sees a continued growth in sound for Slow Club, something that Charles highlights stating. “I think It’s important for all bands to move away from their last album. There’s a lot of complicated arrangements on Paradise which made them hard to perform live. So before we recorded the album we started to road test a lot of the songs ahead of the studio”.
Indeed this approach began to shape the tracks for both the recording process and live performance. Recalling how one such song benefited from this Watson comments “When we first stated playing ‘Not Mine To Love’ it was a full band arrangement. But now it’s just Rebecca solo and acoustic and it really works. She does such a great performance and we just track that live in the studio. We didn’t want to have it bogged down by too much production.”
With the songs going through a live then studio writing process Watson explains how Slow Club’s live shows have changed to suit. “It’s a slightly different set-up now.” he continues. “Both myself and Rebecca love harmonies so we wanted to work in a lot more four-part harmonies into the shows. It’s one of those things whenever we see other bands doing those sort of arrangements, we always end up getting shivers on the back of our necks and that’s something we want people to get from out performances.”
Not ones to rest on rest on their laurels, when asked about future Slow Club projects Charles stated that the group were already looking ahead to writing new songs while also continuing the duo’s evolving style. “We have a European tour coming up. But we want to keep writing as well. We have this idea of writing the next album to be performed by just a band of eight people, tour it and arrange it for live shows, then just go into the studio and record it live”.
Slow Club’s new album Complete Surrender is out now. Click below to watch the music video for the single ‘Suffering You, Suffering Me’.
