bdrmm sign to Rock Action and announce new album "I don´t know" out june 30th. The band share the video for new single "It's Just A Bit Of Blood".
Following the release of 2020's widely-acclaimed debut LP "Bedroom", and a clutch of hotly-received singles since, the Hull based shoegaze quartet bdrmm return with the news that they have signed to Mogwai's Rock Action and that the revered independent label will release their anticipated second album "I Don't Know" on June 30th. Like their debut, the album was recorded with long-time band collaborator Alex Greaves (Working Men’s Club, Bo Ningen) at The Nave Studios in Leeds.
The band also share their first material for the label, and the first taster of the new album, with the expansive and dynamic "It's Just A Bit Of Blood". Paired to a video directed, filmed and edited by Chris Tomsett / Innerstrings (Overmono, James Holden, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats), the band's Ryan Smith had the following to say about the themes behind the new single, already fast becoming a live favourite:
"Most people who have seen us tour will recognise this track. The more we played it, the more it dawned on us it was becoming something special, and an integral part of our set. Lyrically, it stems from my recent mental health awareness. I’d become depressed and very socially anxious, I really felt like I had changed and didn’t know who I was. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by three of my brothers within this band - one literally by blood - and have always been able to be myself with them. It’s about realising what you have and remembering that when you can’t see it."
The band collectively had the following to say about their decision to sign with their new label:
“We’re so excited to have signed to Rock Action. After touring with Mogwai and forming such a close relationship with them, we feel blessed to have been invited to work with them and their team.
To be on the same label as Arab Strap too? I mean, say no more..”
The band will support their new label bosses Mogwai tonight (Tuesday, February 7th) at The Garage in London, and today announce plans for a string of instore performances around the album, with tickets available by pre-ordering the album through the individual stores. The band have also announced a series of headline dates for November including their biggest London headliner yet at Scala.
While the world became socially distanced in 2020, Hull’s post-shoegaze, dream pop, heavy guitar effects quartet bdrmm made the kind of impact with their debut album any young band would dream about. Released on the small Sonic Cathedral label in July that year, Bedroom was hailed as “a heady, forward-thinking shoe gaze distillation” by Clash magazine. Mojo said that the band tread the “queasy tightrope of prime Cure, Ride etc. with real dexterity.” The Guardian proclaimed “one of the underground hits of lockdown,”, while NME awarded the album five solid stars and called Bedroom nothing less than “a modern day shoe gaze classic.”
The stunning debut was championed by the likes of Huw Stephens, Lauren Laverne, Steve Lamacq and John Kennedy, entered the Official UK chart three times, ended up in Rough Trade’s Top 10 albums of 2020 and turbo-boosted the band’s Spotify following, which now reaches just short of 300,000 listeners each month.
Three years on, the band’s new album I Don’t Know takes the adventure somewhere else. It’s contemporary shoegaze in a way but much, much more. Again recorded at The Nave studio in Leeds with producer Alex Greaves (Working Men’s Club, Bo Ningen), the band’s trademark effects-laden guitars and motorik Neu! grooves have now been augmented by piano, strings, electronica, sampling and even occasional dance beats. Fragile ambient pieces line up against pulverising guitar chords, sometimes within the same song. There are ambient washes and delicate piano pieces, while influences or reference points veer from Radiohead to My Bloody Valentine to the Cure to Brian Eno - perhaps - the minimalist classical of the likes of Erik Satie. Whatever has produced it, it’s a bigger-sounding, more tuneful, really rather fantastic second statement by four young men who are rightly sure about what they’re doing and loving every minute of it.
“We’re still coming from the same place, but the influences have got much broader,” confirms singer-guitarist Ryan Smith. His younger brother Jordan (bass, now also keyboards) has been checking out Steve Reich and Boards Of Canada and says, “A lot of it is just us gaining confidence, and also not wanting to retread old ground. We’d made the guitar record. So we were thinking, ‘What else can we do?’”
Musically they experimented with everything from “pure atmospherics” to eight-minute songs but lyrically, it was more a case of expanding and developing what was already there. On Bedroom, Ryan Smith was writing mainly from a personal perspective - about relationship break-ups, substance abuse and mental health, issues anyone can relate to especially after three years of pandemic, war and economic crisis. This time, the songs still come from a personal place but are more wide-ranging and more universal.
“Everything’s still probably based on things that have happened to me, but I’m writing more ambiguously, so that it can be understood by others in whatever situation they’re going through.
I always think the first record feels like one person’s relationship, whereas this is so much broader, and can be interpreted in different ways.”
Ryan explains,
It's also the product of different environments, with songs written everywhere from at home in Hull to driving through the Alps, as they have become a touring band. While the album was mostly recorded at The Nave, it benefitted from a week at a farm in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, a “retreat” which the producer’s friends turned into a recording studio.
“It felt like going to a kids’ club in summer, We all had different rooms. I was writing upstairs. Conor was in another room behind the drum set. We were all staying there so we’d spend the night together drinking or whatever and then the whole day making music.”
grins Jordan
I Don’t Know will be the group’s first release for Mogwai’s label, Rock Action, a partnership which came about when the two bands toured together.
“We were really drunk one night and Stuart (Braithwaite) said ‘I’d love to sign you’,” Jordan chuckles. “It was like a lot of flirting, but it felt like one of those things that was just said in a drunken conversation. Then he got in contact sober… and we were like, ‘This is actually gonna happen.’”
With other influences stretching from Deerhunter to DIIV to Warp to 4AD to ambient jazz soundtracks, both brothers taught themselves to play. They’ve brought this burgeoning confidence to I Don’t Know. It’s more of a group effort than the debut, the new album’s eight songs reflecting experiences, musical maturity and a growing ability to turn the personal into the universal. Dreamily busy opener Alps’ combines ambient washes, busy dance beats and blissful, beautifully hazy lyrics. The song’s sense of movement and travelogue reflects its birthplace - it was written in a van as the band drove through the Alps listening to “Thom Yorke’s electronic stuff”. The bass-driven, slightly trip-hop grooved, gently anthemic Be Careful is an instruction to the listener to do exactly that. Heavy guitars and the band’s love of Radiohead and Ride power the mysterious It’s Just A Bit Of Blood, which darkly asks someone “Where do you get off?” before the krautrock-pop We Fall Apart partly captures what Ryan describes as “how people are feeling”. This may refer to someone experiencing relationship breakup or a wider populace facing wider threats of a changing world impacted by climate and economic crisis, but Ryan has been careful to be more ambitious than “I’m sad, blah blah. Blah.” For Jordan, this particular song - with its sublime narrated coda - is also “about the times over the years where it’s been hard to continue being a band, and where it would have been easier to bow out. But we didn’t. For me, the songs all have a multitude of meanings.” The listener can put their own interpretation on the beautifully pensive ambient instrumental Advertisement One, and there’s an emerging pop nous to the hazily tuneful Pulling Stitches. Hidden Cinema is one of the most hauntingly vulnerable bdrmm songs to date, a raw and honest admission of personal imperfections and even failures. Musically, surely the most ambitious thing the band have done to date is majestic closer A Final Movement, which at an epic eight minutes and eight seconds might be one for the numerologists to ponder. Musically it opens like a flower from a serene synthesiser opening to a widescreen, cinematic-type grandeur, teased along the way with Chameleons-type guitar shapes.
Lyrically, it expands something they first explored on Bedroom’s sublime song A Reason To Celebrate - a theme Jordan describes as “accepting the beauty of something not working out”. Indeed, the song began life around that first album as a slow core guitar song titled Duster, but has since developed enormously.
“We’re massive fans of Oneohtrix Point Never,”
explains the bassist.
“He had a song called Chrome Country with this amazing opening chord. We just wanted to create that kind of beautiful synthesis and threw everything into it. It’s the first time I’ve written strings for anything, so why not do it on an eight minute song?” Indeed, why not? “We’ve always followed our instincts and done what felt right,” smiles Ryan. “Surely, if you’re in a band, that’s the most important thing you should do.”
Photo by Katherine Mackenzie
Tour Dates
June Wednesday 28th - Hull - Adelphi Thursday 29th - Hull - Adelphi Friday 30th - Leeds - Jumbo Records July Saturday 1st - London - Rough Trade East Sunday 2nd - Brighton - Resident Records Monday 3rd - Bristol - Rough Trade Tuesday 4th - Nottingham - Rough Trade Wednesday 5th - Monorail - Glasgow November Friday 12th - Glasgow - Stereo Monday 13th - Birmingham - The Hare and Hounds Tuesday 14th - Salford - The White Hotel Wednesday 15th - Nottingham - Bodega Thursday 16th - Leeds - Stylus Saturday 18th - Cardiff - Clwb Ifor Bach Sunday 19th - Bristol - Thekla Monday 20th - London - Scala Wednesday 22nd - Cambridge - Mash Thursday 23rd - Bedford - Esquires Friday 24th - Brighton - Patterns Sunday 26th - Dublin - The Button Factory Tickets go on sale at 11am Wednesday, 8th February via bdrmm.co.uk