How do you follow up an award winning album?
That may or may not have been a question running through the minds of the members ofWintersleep while crafting their new albumNew Inheritors, but they’ve come close to succeeding regardless.
More than three years after the release of their Juno Award winning disc Welcome To The Night Sky, New Inheritors finds the Halifax-based rockers sticking to their bead and butter of textured, atmospheric indie pop while expanding into lusher, more orchestral territory. The result is an album seemingly destined to further the band’s growing stature outside of their native Canada.
And the band can’t wait to throw the songs at fans from the stage. The three year wait between records is the longest it’s gone without new material to play behind.
“I don’t think we realized until we started recording this new record how long it had been,” said singer/songwriter Paul Murphy. “We were so busy touring behind Welcome To The Night Sky that we didn’t realize how long it had been between records. But now that we’re playing new songs, we realize how nice it is to be playing a set we haven’t been playing for the past couple of years. It’s good to switch it up.”
The road has been friendly to Wintersleep over the past few years. Not only has increased touring opened their music up to wider audiences, but it’s where they did most of the writing behind the new disc. The success of the last disc and the increased touring and exposure that came with it helped inform the new songs, Murphy said.
“That was sort of part of our writing process, just being on tour and writing songs in lots of different cities, piecing things together whenever we could. I think that brought a sort of urgency to the record.”
Off the road, the band gathered in Montreal, a home away from home from their native Nova Scotia, to bunker down, rehearse and record the new album. The band fine tuned the record over two preproduction sessions in July and September of last year before rolling tape in the fall and winter months.
“It’s kind of neat when you have a lot of ideas that you know are going to become songs, but you don’t really have them 100 percent written until you go into the studio. We had been working on these songs for such a long time, and then to finally be able to get them ready is nice. The songs com together, then you record it a few days or a week later. It’s a kind of a neat way to do it.”
Sonically the band finds itself in somewhat of a new place on the record, exploring more classical elements and incorporating strings and the occasional horn into its repertoire.
But fleshing out their sound wasn’t much of a conscious decision, Murphy said. Rather, the band just followed its impulses. If a song called for strings, they recorded it with strings.
“Every record we make feels like we’re growing,” he said. “We find ourselves developing from where the last record left off. The decision to use strings wasn’t deliberate. It was more a case of ‘Wow, this song is great and it would be really cool if there were some strings added in here.’ We played it by ear.”
“We’ve never been opposed to doing new things like that, but it just maybe wasn’t as necessary to delve into that stuff on past albums,” he added. “This time it felt like there were moments where those new sounds could better the songs.”
While the new studio touches are nice, fans shouldn’t expect them to drag out an orchestra on stage when the band hits Great Scott in support of Matt Pond P.A. on Saturday.
“Maybe down the road we’ll try something, depending on the venue. But it’s kind of hard to justify bringing a string quartet on tour when they’re only used for two songs. It just wouldn’t work as well for a support tour.”
Wintersleep w/ Matt Pond P.A. Saturday, June 5 at Great Scott (1222 Commonwealth Ave, Allston). Doors open at 9 PM. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 day of show. For more visit www.greatscottboston.com.
RB
