Interview: Do Nothing - Issue 43

Do Nothing in Issue Forty-Three by Eve Boothroyd

Illustration by Shunny Kim

The daunting task of the debut album is no easy feat for anyone. For a band with as extensive of a personal history and as large of an eager following as Do Nothing, it was a trial fraught with overthinking and self-doubt. The resulting album ‘Snake Sideways’ is an astounding exploration of many of the psychological struggles that come with a group face to face with the challenge. It is a brilliant, experimental study of an act taking that jump and landing on their feet. The signature wry humour of the lyrics remain, but the music feels like it has matured and blossomed in complexity during the album writing process. Ahead of the release of their highly anticipated debut to the world, we spoke to Do Nothing about how they made it happen and their feelings now it’s complete.

Your debut album ‘Snake Sideways’ is out soon and it’s your first new music since ‘Glueland’. How did you approach the task of the debut album and tackle the daunting nature of it?

Chris: It was a weird one because technically both of our EPs were released in lockdown. For the first one, we’d been playing the songs for a while and we recorded them just as lockdown was starting. That EP was released just as things were getting kind of weird. And then, obviously, it was still a lockdown for the second EP ‘Glueland’. It meant that we hadn’t been playing loads of shows where we could try out new material. Normally you have the songs that you’ve got released and when you write a new one you can add it to the setlist, even though nobody’s heard it, and that’s how you end up playing it a lot. But with the album it was more that we would write the stuff and then have to sit and just learn how to play it. You know, like, learn how to play it together in a room. It was quite a lot of time spent sort of fiddling stuff before we actually went into the studio, and then when we were in the studio, we were still kind of fiddling with things.

C: The guy who produced it is Andy Savours. Some producers aren’t open to having a hand in the songwriting in a structural way, but, for example, if there was a little section that probably didn’t need to be there, he would potentially raise his hand and say “that doesn’t need to be there.” Which was nice because unless you show your music to people a lot of the time you just release it and that’s pretty much the first time you get feedback. It’s nice to have, like, a wall of defence between us and the audience, I guess that was handy.

Kasper: He’d give us homework to do after a day session and we would stay in the studio. It meant that we were able to go in and sort of try writing new stuff that we were in the process of recording. There was some stuff that we spent like hours working on and the next day he’s come in and said let’s keep it the old way and other’s where he’d say that’s great let’s put that in

Having been away from those live shows for so long, did you feel like you were writing the tracks for a live audience or to be recorded?

C: I guess there are two different versions of writing. Sometimes you’re just writing and you’re focused on thinking about people listening to it on record, you’ve got that in your head. And sometimes when you’re writing it feels like it would be good live and you end up thinking, I can expand on that and make it really good live.

K: The album is a bit more like ‘Glueland’ in a way than ‘Zero Dollar Bill’ because we had a lot of time spent writing that wasn’t on the road. It feels like a nice balance of about half and half stuff that’s more geared towards live and stuff that’s got little studio bits going on. That’s one of the things that we really like a lot is just the little titbits that you can get on the record, that’s important to us, I think.

Read the interview in full via Issue Forty-Three. In print and online via issuu.