We Are Scientists Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

We Are Scientists

Out of the Lab and On Vacation!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography by Danny Lee Allen (except where stated).

“We’re just like excited on a day to day basis at this point!”

“We’re just getting ready to go on tour, for the most part. Just practicing desperately!”, We Are Scientists’ silver-haired vocalist, guitarist and keyboardist Keith Murray excitedly tells us as we hook up via Zoom, his massive smile instantly lighting up the conversation. “I think our flight out is on the 22nd [November] and our tour starts on the 24th. Not long to go at all!”

It is no wonder that Murray is excited to be returning to his jetsetting lifestyle, because by the time that this issue goes to print, he and bandmate, bassist and backing vocalist Chris Cain, as well as drummer since 2013, Keith Carne, will be performing in the UK and Europe for the first time since they played their biggest headlining show in a decade at London’s Roundhouse in 2019 in celebration of what they called, with characteristic wit, the “fiftieth anniversary” of their 2005 Gold-certified, Virgin Recordsreleased debut album proper, ‘With Love and Squalor’. On 8th October this year, We Are Scientists released their seventh album, ‘Huffy’ on 100% Records. The first album produced by the band themselves, it is a release that a full twenty-four years since Murray and Cain first met at Pomona University in Claremont, California, finds the band seemingly more brimming with ideas than ever before, as well as even more elaborate ways in which to present them visually. Whilst, this July, they tapped into the sheer unadulterated joy of our first summer of freedom in what frankly felt like ages with the third single to be lifted from ‘Huffy’, ‘Contact High’ and its video shot in the Miami sunshine with Murray and Cain playing the parts of jetski couriers, ‘Huffy’ and its accompanying tour are here to bring some much needed warmth to the winter months.

With bags packed (possibly for quite a while judging by the infectious levels of jubilation that he exuded throughout) and ready to head out of the door, there was just time to ask

Murray some last minute pre-flight questions in this career and continent-spanning interview.

Firstly, hello Keith and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Let’s start at the present day, because We Are Scientists’ seventh album, ‘Huffy’, was released on 8th October via 100% Records. This is the first album that you have self-produced, so was that a decision informed by the pandemic and its various lockdowns and how did you find this experience?

It actually wasn’t informed by lockdown. We had started recording the recording the record a couple of weeks before lockdown [laughs] actually occurred and it ended up being ... for all the incredible negatives of, you know, COVID quarantines, a silver lining for us was that it [laughs] gave us more time to figure out what we were doing as producers. Yeah, I think the idea behind self-producing was that we’d been getting more and more involved in sort of the demoing process of our albums. As each album comes along, our demos have been more and more ornate and I think we started seeing in our production of the demos like the sort of character that we think of as being a very We Are Scientists recording voice, so I think we just wanted to see what it would be like if we brought that extra voice into the recordings. But, yeah, like I said, we were thankful for the extra time [laughs] that we got, because everything got shut down and the release of the album got pushed back, because we couldn’t tour on it, so yeah!

So, it worked out well in the end anyway!

I think so! [Laughs].

Could you tell us a bit about the writing process of the ten tracks that make up ‘Huffy’ and what was making you tick as a songwriter at that particular time?

I mean, the process, just our approach

to songwriting, has sort of changed over time. We used to essentially only write the songs that would be on our records. You know, like on our first record [‘With Love and Squalor’, 2005], the twelve songs were the twelve songs that we had, that we hadn’t recorded before. After the EP before ‘With Love and Squalor’ [‘Safety, Fun and Learning (In That Order)’, 2002], those were the twelve songs we wrote, those were the twelve songs we had. We actually had to record the B-sides for that album after that album. We were like, ‘Okay, we need more songs for B-sides, we better record some!’ And, you know, when you’re making records professionally, that becomes a less fun process! The reason those twelve songs were the songs we had was that we would write new songs for the live shows, essentially. You know, when we were playing a club down the block from our house, we would be like ‘Oh, it would be fun to have a new song for this show!’ But when you have the deadline of an album and now that making albums is now like your career, it’s not fun to only have, you know, twelve songs to potentially to be on the record. So, you know, it started effecting the way we thought about writing. It didn’t effect the way we wrote, but it started making us feel very stressed out everytime. Like, when we would write a song, we would be like, ‘Well, is this song good enough to be a single on the next record? Because that’s what we need!’ So, maybe three albums back, we just sort of started writing like loads and loads and loads of songs, just like way more songs than we would ever need or could ever use and like, we stopped caring if we would ever use them and we stopped caring even if they were like very good and it just sort of made writing songs much more fun again. It took away the pressure on each individual song, because there was no way we were going to use each individual song. And then, you know, the pressure would come at the end of the process and we would be like, ‘Well, are there twelve good songs [laughs] in this batch of a hundred songs, or whatever?’ But, it at least, on a song by song basis, it made

it made writing the songs much more pleasurable again, because the pressure wasn’t on each individual song. So, to bring that answer back to what our thought process was, it becomes less specific, because the songs are part of a much huger body of work and it got whittled down to become ‘Huffy’. I think what’s interesting is that there were many songs that we liked as much as the songs on ‘Huffy’, but the songs on ‘Huffy’ were the ones that worked best together, I think. So, yeah, making an album became a process of like figuring out what songs informed one another most interestingly, I think.

So, those songs that you have left off ‘Huffy’, do you think that they will be left where they are or do you think that you will carry those over to another record?

Some of them, I think, will definitely be used for something else. You know, if we write a whole bunch of other songs and those songs still don’t fit with those songs, then I guess they won’t. But, yeah, some of our favourite songs from these recording sessions aren’t on ‘Huffy’, so it would make me sad if some of these songs don’t see the light of day. Maybe they’ll just get put out as an EP or something if they don’t fit the vibe of the next record. But yeah, definitely some of my favourite songs still have not been released.

Wow, it will be interesting to hear them!

Yeah, they are definitely very different from ‘Huffy’. I don’t know, maybe they’re not even as different as I think they are.

How would you consider ‘Huffy’ to compare to your previous records and have you been pleased with the reaction to it so far?

I think, sort of like I said about whether or not those songs we didn’t put on ‘Huffy’ are as different as I think they are, it’s always really hard for me to contextualise our music against our other music. I mean, it feels like a particularly strong batch of songs to me

and I think the energy of ‘Huffy’ is pretty different from our last [album, ‘Megaplex’, 2018], or our last four or five records, actually. It feels very specifically like an album to be played live and I think that is the essence of what I think is different from some of the songs that didn’t get put on. We are very interested in making albums that feel like studio recordings and then worrying about the live versions later on and I sort of always thought that was a failing of our first record [‘With Love and Squalor’]. For me, it feels very much like a live record that we like banged out. I think that’s what’s cool about it and something that people responded to is that there’s a lot of energy to it and I think we are a very good and energetic live band. But, we started thinking that maybe we should think of our albums as a different artform than our live show and that they shouldn’t just be a recording of our live show. But, that said, I think ‘Huffy’ is maybe the best version of those two ideas together. I think it really captures the live aspect of us as a band, but also doesn’t sound like what we sound like as a live band.

‘Huffy’ was preceded by five singles spread across the last year and a half (‘I Cut My Own Hair’; ‘Fault Lines’; ‘Contact High’; ‘You’ve Lost Your Shit’ and ‘Sentimental Education’). This is really the first time you have dripped out singles from an album in this way, but we have noticed that quite a few artists are doing things in a similar way these days, whereas years ago, you generally had one or two singles released before an album as a taster. Was this choice informed by listeners’ streaming and downloading habits or was it more to do with the current world climate and not being able to release the album when you originally wanted to?

I think what really started it was, we had the song ‘I Cut My Own Hair’ and, you know, in lockdown, everybody started cutting their own hair and we got really worried that if we waited too long ... You know, the song is supposed to be about how cutting your

own hair is a very weird thing and demonstrates, not really like a lack of vanity, but a lack of interest in other peoples’ judgements of how you behave and that sort of got taken away. That meaning doesn’t really exist, you know, post-COVID. So, we kind of thought that as long as the original meaning of the song was being stripped away from it, we might as well put it out while it had a new relevant meaning. So, that was why we put ‘I Cut My Own Hair’ out then and then, while we were finishing ‘I Cut My Own Hair’, I don’t know why, but we also finished ‘Fault Lines’ at the same time and got them both mixed together by our mixer, Claudius [Mittendorfer] and when we realised that the album was going to be pushed back because we weren’t going to be able to tour it for at least another year, we just sort of thought it would be a shame for us to go quiet for eighteen months or whatever. So, I think that was the main reason we dribbled ‘Fault Lines’ out at that point. We were like, ‘Well, we have it and it’s a cool fun song, there’s no real point in sitting on it and just sort of disappearing from releasing music’. And then the other three we released were just sort of the normal way [laughs] we would have released singles before an album. But, yeah, I think just the circumstances played into it. But, yeah, it does seem like that is the way many people release music these days. We stopped being concerned about whether that was an unreasonable way to release music, because that does seem to be standard practice these days.

We have noticed that you have really gone to town on the presentation of ‘Huffy’ too, with the vinyl and CD including sticker sheets and many different coloured cassettes and vinyls. It is quite refreshing to see bands such as yourselves putting effort into the way an album is presented in these days of downloading and streaming. When you are making an album, is the way that the finished product will be presented something you are thinking about alongside recording the music and how important is the

way it looks as well as sounds to you as a band?

I mean, I would definitely say it’s not as important to us [laughs], but I think we do ... sort of our band philosophy has always sort of been that as long as we have the opportunity to do things like make physical albums that can have weird stuff inside of them, or make music videos that are crazy, then we will do. I mean, everytime I see a band put out, especially an expensive video that really has none of their personality in it ... I mean, you can tell when a director has made a music video for an artist. It’s like, ‘What?! There’s no way the band said ‘What I want is this line of dancers behind me!’ That never made sense to me. And it’s not like that I think every band needs to be music video directors or anything, but it’s just weird to me to clearly have so little interest in that artform. Like, if you’re as interested in music as you have to be to make it your career, it’s weird to me then to be that disinterested in all the other forms of art that go with it. You know, like, we even think of our Facebook ads as opportunities to write weird ad copy! It always blows my mind when a band has a Facebook ad and it’s like ‘We wrote this new song and we hope you enjoy it, thank you’. It’s like, ‘What the ...?! What are you doing?! It takes ten minutes for you to say like, ‘Well, this is a weird thing that thousands of you are going to read. Should I make something interesting out of that? So, I think that’s how we think about everything we put out into the world and it becomes harder to do the longer [laughs] we’re a band. Like, the more we exhaust weird stuff! Like, everytime we put an album out, we’re like, ‘Well, we can’t do this again, what’s a different, unique thing we can do?’ Yeah, I think that’s just the philosophy that pervades everything we put out. Like, what’s the point of putting this out if we don’t do something interesting with it?

Yeah, definitely! It is nice to see a band who actually do that, because there are so many bands out there where the album might be amazing,

but if everything else is boring, it makes it look like they don’t really care.

Yeah! I mean, I understand that the other stuff is boring, because it IS boring! We’re never excited when someone’s like ‘Oh, we need copy for this Facebook ad’. We’re never like ‘YEEEEEAAAAAAH!’, but you can either treat it like it’s a boring chore or you can say ‘Well, if I’m going to do it, I should do something interesting, so how do we make this interesting?’ I don’t know. You know, I guess I also understand if the main thing you want to do is just write lyrics, then writing a Facebook ad is not what you signed up for!’ [Laughs]. But, you also should be thinking about the fact that’s the way people are interfacing with your band. So, I don’t know, it almost like undermines your music if the thing that’s facing your audience is so boring and has so little character. You’re selling yourself as a band with no voice, I think, [laughs] which is a weird choice to make!

You were saying about videos then and we absolutely loved the video for the third single from ‘Huffy’, ‘Contact High’, released on 1st July this year. But we have noticed that you aren’t generally a fan of making videos. Is that true?

[Laughs] I mean, yeah, I think we like everything about videos except for like the day you’re shooting a video. Filmmaking is such a ... and it sort of goes along with like making a record. I love everything about making a record, except for the moment you’re actually in a studio making a record. Just like that level of technical meticulousness is so boring to me! You know, like setting up a microphone and then like listening to that sound and then changing the microphone and listening to that sound and then moving that microphone two inches. It’s just really boring to me and making a video is very similar to that. It’s like sitting around thinking about lenses, you know, thinking about light diffraction. So yeah, it’s pretty boring! I’ll tell you what makes making a video fun, being on a jetski! That’s fun!

Could you tell us a bit about the experience of making that video for ‘Contact High’?

Yeah, I mean, the video, as with all videos, the video definitely looks more fun than it really was. The day we spent on the jetskis was nothing but fun, that was a fun day, but, you know, that video took probably like four or five days of shooting to get all of the parts. And there are a lot of locations on it and a lot of different forms of transportation, so it was a lot of like driving around Miami, trying to get from one spot to the next, to the next, to the next, so it was very stressful and just like really long days and very tiring. But, I was living in Miami at the time, so it was a lot of fun to have Chris [Cain] come down from New York and have him down in Miami. I think he was only supposed to be in Miami for maybe four days and on like the second day, we were like ‘Man, you need to push your flight back [laughs], because there’s like no way we’ll be finishing this in four days!’ So, it was extra awesome to have him down there and I think he ended up staying like eight or nine days, which was very cool!

Going back to the beginning, when We Are Scientists formed back in 2000, there was quite a thriving New York Indie scene with other bands such as The Strokes and Interpol beginning to take off. How did We Are Scientists come together and how do you feel that you fitted into that New York scene at the time?

I mean, we technically formed in 2000, that’s when we started playing together in our basement. We originally started literally just because Chris and I and our other best friend, Scott [Lamb], all graduated from university [Pomona University in Claremont, California] and just moved in to a house in the San Francisco Bay area together and, you know, all got jobs and we were in that sort of like post-university malaise where we were like ‘Oh, man! Life is not just like fun anymore! We’re not just like hanging out in dorm rooms, doing whatever we want and like our

biggest problem is having to write a term paper every six weeks, or whatever!’ So, we legitimately just formed a band because I had all of my musical equipment in the basement and the three of us all lived together, so we were like, ‘Well, should we all play music in the basement together?’ It was essentially like a goofy joke art project between the three of us. And then Chris and I moved to New York just because we, I don’t know, thought it would be fun to live in New York. And, you know, neither of us had jobs we particularly liked in the Bay area, so we moved to New York and, yeah, I don’t know if we really felt like we were part of that first wave of the New York scene from like 2001. We moved there in 2001, sort of when The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol and The Rapture were all blowing up and it definitely like kicked our ass! It definitely made us realise that we needed to be much, much, much better band! I think we feel like a product of that scene more than anything else, because we got there and saw what all the bands were doing and just they

We Are Scientists in 2005

were very good, tight live bands, but also that they were sort of like taking chances and kind of being weird and I think, before that, the thing we were most interested in was writing very like good Pop songs, kind of straightforward Pop songs. And I think moving to New York made us want to write very weird Pop songs, which I think was a good approach for us. I think it just made us add a lot more of our character to it.

There have been various explanations of where the name ‘We Are Scientists’ came from, but what is the official version?

The official true version is that when we all graduated from university and we had moved to San Francisco, we had a rental van that was moving all our stuff up there and we brought it back to the rental company and the guy who was checking the van, just to make sure we hadn’t destroyed it, took a look at us and we were all pretty similar looking guys, you know, all pretty skinny dudes wearing glasses, like all

about the same height, and he asked if we were brothers and we said ‘No, we’re not brothers’. And so his second guess was like, if we’re not brothers, we must all be scientists. We were like, ‘No, we’re also not scientists, but okay, we’ll go with that, I guess!’ [Laughs].

Following the 2002 release ‘Safety, Fun and Learning (In That Order)’ on your own label, Devious Semantics, most people in the UK, including myself, discovered you with the release of the debut album proper, ‘With Love and Squalor’, in 2005 on Virgin Records. Was a major label deal something you were looking for from the outset and how did you come to spend those few years on Virgin (and later EMI following the 2007 Virgin / EMI merger) for ‘With Love and Squalor’ and second album, 2008’s ‘Brain Thrust Mastery’?

It definitely wasn’t like a specific goal of ours. We definitely never said ‘Oh, we need to be on a major label’, but we were also never one of those bands that like thought being on a major label was a sell-out move. I would say that most of our favourite bands were not on major labels, but you know, then bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even like more mainstream stuff like The Killers and stuff were all major label bands. And, you know, like growing up, Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, even like weird bands like White Zombie and stuff that I was into, were all on major labels, so I definitely didn’t have a prejudice against it. And then, there were very specific positive aspects to being on a major label and there were very, very specific negatives to being on a major label. People like to pretend that being on a major label involves a lot of meddling into your art and we definitely never experienced that. We definitely feel that a very positive thing about being on a major label was that they had lots and lots of money and they didn’t really care about all their money, so they let us do ... and we didn’t get lots and lots and lots of money, but we got more money than we would have had. They gave us

money to do very stupid things that we wanted to do. Like, if you look at the stuff that we did while we were on EMI, it’s weird! Like, our videos are weird and on our second record [‘Brain Thrust Mastery’], we did like a whole promotional campaign that was us doing a self-help course and they paid for like two weeks of shooting that stuff. That was something that we would never have got to do and it didn’t make them any money, they were just like ‘We have all this money for promotion, what do you want to do with it?’ And we said, ‘We want to shoot this weird thing where we pretend that we’re self-help gurus’ and they were like, ‘Okay!’ And we were like, ‘What?! Okay!’ And they set it all up, they did all of the boring, like, production work and stuff, so in many ways, that’s very cool and I love that. But the negative about it is that we had very good personal relationships with very specific people we worked with, but there were hundreds of people, including the people in charge, that we had no relationship with at all. And so that was weird. You know, in some ways, you like kind of feel a little bit ... unless you’re Coldplay or whatever, you’re kind of just a cog in EMI’s machine. And so, if the little people that you have great relationships with leave, which with a major label, they all do, all of the time ... the turnover at major labels is HUGE! And it’s weird because they just leave one major label and get a job at a different major label doing the same thing, but just now you don’t work with them anymore. That to me was a big negative, because you kind of feel like your relationships are very precarious. So, the thing I like much more about working with smaller labels is that it’s a very intimate relationship with the people who are in charge of the label, so we like that a lot.

Having released ‘With Love and Squalor’ and ‘Brain Thrust Mastery’ on major labels, what did you learn from that experience that you have carried over into releasing through independent labels for ‘Barbara’ (2010); ‘TV en Français’ (2014); ‘Helter Skelter’ (2016); ‘Megaplex’ (2018) and ‘Huffy’ (‘Barbara’ was

released on PIAS Records, whilst the last four albums have been released on 100% Records)?

I mean, to go back to the conversation about like bands who aren’t very hands on in everything, I think that was a good habit. I think that habit got formed by being on a major label, because the budget for everything was big enough that we thought it would be crazy for us not to take advantage of it. To us, it seemed like it would be a crime not to take that opportunity. We were like, ‘Well, we’re never going to be in this position again to shoot commercials!’ And I know that no other band on EMI was writing their commercials that would go on like MTV! We were like, ‘Screw you, we are definitely writing that commercial!’ [for ‘With Love and Squalor’]. I think that was like the first thing that ever got presented to us and we were like, ‘Wait!’ They were like, ‘So, I think it’ll be the album cover and then maybe like a bit of the ‘Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt’ video and it’ll be this voiceover. Is that okay?’ And we were like ‘NOOOOO! No way, that is NOT okay! Here’s the video we want to shoot!’ And the video is us in a boardroom like not understanding how the music industry works. And it’s a stupid commercial! It’s probably a bad commercial, right? But I think it communicates our character as a band more than like, you know, ‘With Love and Squalor, the new album by We Are Scientists!’ [Laughs]. Like, who cares? Who gives a shit? So I think that is what that era like imbued in us, sort of like an interest in all of those different aspects of it. It’s weird that being on a major label made us more DIY [laughs] than I think we would have been if we hadn’t been. I think because the opportunity was there, we like stepped up to it.

Obviously, it is a while since you have been over here, but you start a thirteen-date tour of the UK on 24th November at the Leadmill in Sheffield. We, in the UK, have really taken We Are Scientists to our hearts over the years, but do you have any favourite memories from being over

here on previous tours?

Pppfff, I mean, we have so many that there aren’t really specific ones. There are just like a billion good ones, like that NME tour [ShockWaves NME Awards Tour 2006] that we did with Mystery Jets and Arctic Monkeys was just like an amazing three or four weeks, or whatever it was. A few years ago, we hosted, do you remember the magazine The Fly? It was like The Barfly’s promotional magazine. We hosted their award ceremony [2014] and that was like another sort of weird thing. We were like ‘We don’t know what we’re doing, we’re just going to make it as weird as possible!’ [Laughs] And it was a very weird award ceremony that year! That was a big fun one. We shot like a little short TV series for MTV2 called ‘Steve Wants His Money’ in 2009, that was a fun one. I don’t know, we have lots!

Finally, are there any dates that you are particularly looking forward to playing and people and places you are looking forward to seeing to on the upcoming UK tour?

I mean, it’s been so long since we’ve been on tour that kind of all of them! Usually I’m like most excited for, you know, the London show, because that will be where probably most of our friends will be. Usually, our shows in Leeds and Manchester will be a lot of fun and like Scotland is always a lot of fun. But this time, kind of like all of them! The first show is in Sheffield and I’m like ‘Man, I can’t wait to be back in Sheffield!’ So, I don’t know, we’re just like excited on a day to day basis at this point!

Thank you for a wonderful interview. We wish you continued success with ‘Huffy’ and all the best for the upcoming tour and for the future.

‘Huffy’ is out now on 100% Records.

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