SLAVES

Having spent almost their entire careers as divisive figures, Slaves’ emotionally-direct third album has finally seen critical opinion soften. Not that it bothers them much. With ‘Acts of Fear and Love’ finally out in the world, we caught up with Laurie and Isaac to talk about their label, songwriting and why having a crowd singing back the songs is more important than any fawning broadsheet review.

Q: The new album’s out in the world, how does it feel!?

Isaac: Feels good man, it’s a nice time but releasing an album is such a weird unexplainable feeling. You’ve been sitting on that, writing it, recording it, perfecting it, and then all of a sudden it feels like it’s not yours any more. You don’t own it. We’re buzzing and people seem pretty happy with it.

Q: The reviews look to be really positive so far. Which for you guys must be strange...

Isaac: Yeah exactly, it’s like even if people don’t like us for whatever reason they’ve got to appreciate it. We feel like this is definitely our best work to date, and I feel like people are feeling like that as well.

Q: When you went in to write it, was that a conscious thing, that you wanted to subvert those expectations?

Isaac: Yeah. I don’t really feel like we put our hearts and souls into the album before this one. We just banged it out and then it didn’t feel like a real body of work. Whereas with this one we wanted it to feel like a journey. We put a lot of thought into different parts of the songs and there’s more experimentation with melodies. We put way more into the tunes on this record.

Q: Do you find that takes longer to do, the more melodic songs? Or did it come easily?

Isaac: I feel like in a way it was there, for both of us that’s our favourite kind of music to listen to. Melancholic, “nice” music. So I feel like we’ve always had it in us to want to do that but it definitely took a bit longer for us because we weren’t really used to it. Parts of some songs we’d spend days on, whereas before we’d never do anything like that.

Q: What kind of music is that, what artists influenced that sound?

Isaac: My mum’s like a proper soul girl, so I grew up on that stuff. My old man’s just into absolutely everything, just a mad vinyl geek basically. So I’ve just always been into everything. Do you know what, when Baxter Dury - when Happy Soup came out - that was a complete game changer for me, and Laurie I think as well. I remember we were driving to and from gigs and playing that on repeat and I feel like Baxter’s definitely influenced our band quite a lot.

Q: You can hear that in your new record as well - you’ve done the jokes thing before, but in this one it feels more open and revealing.

Issac: That’s what we’ve tried to do, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but on the other hand we really do. We’re serious blokes. I think this album for us, just reveals a lot more of our personalities whereas before we were just barking about the same kind of subject quite a lot and I feel like now we’ve got a lot more personal.

Q: How have you been finding the new songs go down live?

Isaac: We’ve been doing in-stores this week and they’re all pretty much acoustic sets and for some we didn’t even have a PA, so me with a tambourine and Laurie with an acoustic guitar. It’s really interesting, it’s a completely different experience, but I got a really similar buzz off it. It seems like the softer tunes are going doing really well at the moment.

Q: How do you guys normally write songs, and did this album work in the same way?

Isaac: 99% of the time I do the lyrics and Laurie does the guitar. A lot of the time Laurie will plant the seed in my head, he’ll have a really good one liner for a tune and then off that it’ll just grow. We literally just couldn’t do it without each other. We’re very much a partnership. Laurie has so many ideas. He’s constantly on his guitar working bits out and coming to me with ideas. He has so many ideas and I’ll just kind of sift through them.

Q: What is the album about, lyrically. If you had to surmise it?

A: When we first started writing the album, the phrase “fear and love” was just stuck in my head, and I kept saying to Laurie “fear and love” and he was unsure about it. I thought it’d be a good title for a song but he was quite unsure about it, you know, it’s a really epic sounding phrase. It almost sounds too big or cheesy or something. But then we got into the studio to start writing and Laurie was like: “where does it even come from, that fear and love?” And I just said to him “I had someone tell me, there’s no such thing as hate, just fear and love…” And he was like: “That’s it.” And it just all sort of suddenly made sense. And it was from that point that it all started unravelling. And I think the thing that runs through the album is that it’s what I’m feeling rather than just trying to bark about what I think everyone else is feeling.

*Swaps phone to Laurie*

Q: So we’ve been talking to Isaac about the record, the other interesting thing you’re up to at the moment is your label. Tell us about that.

Laurie: So we’re working on Lady Bird at the moment, they’re our main priority. We want to get them to a place where they can navigate the industry a bit better, we really passionately believe in those boys and that was what sort of started us on this path. We always wanted to do a label, it started early on when we saw that Baby Strange weren’t getting the recognition they deserved, and then a similar feeling towards Life, but they’d already worked out how they were releasing their album. Then when Lady Bird came to us with those demos it just of all sort of felt right. They’re mates and personal friends of ours and we have a history together, so it seemed like a no brainer.

I’ve always loved labels like Two Tone and Sub Pop that have a real identity, even Rough Trade, and if we were going to do a label it would have to have a real strong identity and Lady Bird are one of the first bands that I feel come from a real similar place as us.

Q: How do you know those guys? I keep reading there’s a connection there from before the record label stuff.

A: So Isaac is like best friends with them all from where he grew up. For me, Sam the lead singer was a drummer in different bands growing up so he was from Tunbridge Wells and I was from Maidstone and I used to go and watch his bands and be blown away by him as a musician. And then he was in a band with Isaac and that was how I met him for the first time and then more recently I’ve met Joe and Alex, Alex is quite a good friend of Isaacs. It’s mainly through Isaac, but I have a separate relationship with the lead singer Sam.

I’ve watched Sam grow up, and he probably still is the best drummer I’ve ever seen. But he’s a front-man now.

Q: Do you have your eyes on the next band you want to work with?

A: We look at stuff and we’ve been sent a lot of demos that we’re going through and there are people that we like... The reason we’re working with friends at the moment is that it makes the relationship a lot easier. Next time if we were to sign a band who we don’t have a relationship with already… basically, we can’t give everything at the moment because we’re in album mode. But I think Lady Bird understood where we were coming from and how much we could help, and what we could help with and when the word “label” gets thrown about people all of a sudden think there’s a lot of money being thrown around but this is a passion project and we want to be ready when we do take it to the next level - we want to do it to the best of our ability.

I had this vision of them when they supported us at the Tunbridge Wells Forum and I just thought, this band could do it. They have all the ingredients.

Q: Isaac seems chuffed with how the album’s been going down, how have you found it?

A: I’m completely stunned at the response. We’ve never had so much positive feedback to anything we’ve ever done. People are genuinely loving it and that feels incredible. We’ve done the unthinkable and made a record that actually is being hailed as better than our first record which we never thought we’d do really.

Q: What do you think made that difference?

A: I think mentality has a lot to do with it. You have to be willing to deconstruct your band and then build it up again. And look at how you write songs. That takes a lot of doing, that’s not just “let’s write a song.” You have to sit down and analyse everything you’ve ever done and work out what works and what doesn’t and how you can make it better and you have to want to do that. I think it’s really easy to just go and write songs. You can just go and put some stuff together and put it out, but we analysed it all. We let a producer produce us. There were songs that have seven different versions, it’s a mindset that you want to outdo yourself. We didn’t want it to be the same as we’d done before.

I think it was from being a bit disappointed from where we finished up after the last album.

Q: In what sense disappointed?

A: For us it was going to shows and seeing reactions to the songs. Towards the end of the last summer the biggest moments in the sets were the songs from the first album, none of the new songs had really caught on in the same way, whereas now, even a week into our album, all the tracks we play from the new album have the same reaction as some of our older songs. The last album just didn’t feel right, it felt rushed to get the album out. It didn’t flow, it was really laborious. So by the time you release that it’s a bit fraying.

Q: Can you see yourself with the first record going even further away from the early Slaves formula?

A: I really want to - I don’t want to just make songs that we’ve already made. There was this big moment writing the new album, where I realised that if you’ve written ‘The Hunter’ once and you’ve written ‘Beauty Quest’ once you don’t need to write them again. You can always play those songs in your live set, there’s not a lifespan… we want to go somewhere else. There’s always been moments on the album that show our true selves, but I definitely want to keep going down that melodic route - I enjoy it a lot more - it feels like more of a challenge to me and I think they are harder to construct and the payoff is incredible. Watching everybody sing the new songs back has been incredible. Those big moments in the set are always amazing to witness. A lot of people are asking why it’s only nine tracks, but I think it’s really important because we want it to be intense. An album doesn’t need to be longer than that.

Q: No it’s great and it feels like an album you can sit down and listen to in one go at that length. It’s not just a big collection of bangers.

A: What people started to think about us got really irritating, and it gets you down a bit... We wanted to make music that actually showed our true selves and that’s why there are those punk rock moments but also these bigger song moments because that’s what I truly want to achieve. This album was kind of like about setting the record straight, maybe. We always knew we had it in us but then it dawned on us that people getting the wrong end of the stick about us, it’s kind of our fault, and we actually just need to change tack a little bit rather than just being a screamy punk band who are like: “why doesn’t anyone get us?” Where it was actually us that made it hard to understand.

Words by Rob Knaggs | Illustration by Sac Magique