New Model Army has been a favourite band of ours for many years but it has also been a band whose worldview, as it has been reflected through their music, we respect and feel connected to throughout the years. We listened to their great latest album ‘From Here‘ , we shared our thoughts about it but we also had the pleasure of discussing this album and many more things with Justin Sullivan over the phone, a few days before the band’s Autumn tour begins. This interview almost closes the circle that the process of listening to an album opens up. There is nothing on the planet, that this interview does not talk about and we sure hope that you enjoy reading it.
Blauerosen: Hi Justin, thank you for joining me in this interview and congratulations on the release of another great album. You are about to start your Autumn tour from Southampton in a few days and you have spent your summer doing festival appearances. What was the best moment of these festivals so far?
Justin: We did quite a lot of festivals but the last one was in the North of Germany in the bit that you think is Denmark but it isn’t. It was on a farm, in the middle of nowhere and some of the buildings on this farm were medieval. People had just put together this festival where chickens and ducks were running around and it was everything that a festival should be.
Blauerosen: One of these festivals was the 28th WGT in Leipzig. I don’t think you have ever performed at this festival before. This is one of the very few in the world that has a very strong character. What did you think of it? How was your experience there? Did you have the time to see any other bands while you were there?
Justin: I really liked the vibe of the festival. The venue we were playing was a bit out of town so we didn’t see that much.
Blauerosen: The new album ‘From Here‘ was recorded at a studio in a Norwegian island and its sound was inspired by the setting there. I wonder, what came first, the choice of the place or the desire to create a new album? Why did you pick that studio? Was there something specific you wanted to explore in this last album sonically?
Justin: We decided to do a new album with the same team that we did ‘Winter‘ with, Jamie and Lee. We thought about the new album quite a lot. In terms of sonics, we decided that we wanted to go for the New Model Army big pounding sound but we also wanted the album to sound quite open and big. We decided to take the guitars away from the rhythm section so that their sound was ‘clean’ and this created this big ‘space’. Obviously the album was made in the context of everything that was happening in the world, but when I was writing the lyrics for it, I just wanted to take a step back from this whole thing of everybody screaming at each other and look at the bigger picture. We’ve written a lot of songs about ‘us and them‘ and I didn’t want this album to be full of ‘us and them’, I wanted this album to be full of ‘us’. With both these things in our heads, Jamie and Lee had this little studio where we recorded ‘Winter’ and this made that album sound like a very loud band in a very small room. This time we wanted the album to sound very big and we looked at various studios in Britain and it was Lee and Jamie who discovered this place in Norway so when we looked at pictures we said ‘we have got to do it, it has to be there‘. It is in a spectacular place but it also a brilliant studio in itself.
Release Date: 23 August 2019
1.Passing Through/2. Never Arriving/3. The Weather/4. End of Days/5. Great Disguise/6.Conversation/7. Where I Am/8. Hard Way/9. Watch And Learn/10. Maps/11. Setting Sun
Label: Attack Attack Records, Ear Music
Here we all are, almost at the end of another year which seems to have passed as quickly as a couple of months. New Model Army have had something of grave importance to share with us about the state of things around us and their own attitude towards them; and they did so in the best way they could possibly do it, with a new powerful album entitled ‘From Here‘.
Whether, like us, you were intrigued to build a phrase around this album’s title or not, you must agree that it conceptually represents a sort of an ethical standpoint. Just imagine how these two words of the title would change if there was an exclamation mark at the end, a question mark, or if even if there was an ellipsis after them…What would precede these words if they came at the end of a sentence and what would this sentence talk about?
When I was heading towards Paper Dress Vintage for this gig, I chose to listen to a mix of coldwave and modern classical music. In that way, I was preparing myself for whatever a ‘typical’ punk gig entails. Just how far away from reality would this assumption (about what to expect) would turn out to be, was something I could not have predicted. Below, you will read about the gig that numbed my brain for at least two hours after it finished.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”-Albert Einstein
June was a particularly interesting month in terms of its album releases, the most favourite of which, make a journey from ethereal folk towards doom post-rock.
During this month, I found myself delving more into the condition of ‘post‘ both in music and in art in general. It was actually a definition of ‘the post’, that was provided in one of the numerous student projects at the Architectural Association, combined with a memorable variété/architectural event inside the Hippodrome Casino about post-modern architecture, that enlightened me in such a way that I can now ‘see’ post music with new eyes.
One of the multiple definitions was: ‘A post is a position or a state that defines where or how something or someone has to be, as it was meant to be’. Another one said ‘…a post is a node, a meeting point, a gathering spot. A post is where people converge towards…’.
The releases of Band of Holy Joy, The Membranes, Red Velvet Deception, Vlimmer, The Man&His Failures, BLVCK CEILING, Death’s Head, VOID//GIST, Constant Mongrel, PLAID and Such Beautiful Flowers all tap into different aspects of post music by stressing its ‘heavier’ industrial side, the more emotional coldwave side or even its more vindictive punk side.