Germany has always been a hotbed for post-hardcore and alternative rock, and has produced countless influential bands over the years. You can now add Cologne nativeâs underparts to that list. Today we are bringing you the first play of their excellent new album, âwild swimmingâ, and the band have given us a detail track-by-track run down of the record.
âfizzy brown waterâ
âfizzy brown waterâ is a reference to a spot where we went wild swimming at Snakes Pass near Sheffield during our UK tour with Bangers. I think at that point the album name came to our minds. Basically, we decided on the title âwild swimmingâ even before we wrote the first song for it. So this was the starting point of the whole record. The first demo we tracked for the album was this idea, so itâs actually an opener in the literal sense. If you listen closely, the rhythm guitar is also the main riff of âbegging youâ so it is a nice leitmotif of the album.
âQuitâ
The Forgetters-ish sound of the verses resonates with the Dinosaur Jr. part in the chorus. Itâs also our longest song we believe. When Maarten first heard it after the recording and we didnât know where to actually put it in the running order, he said âwhat kind of monster did we create there?!â Also, Maarten insisted on the capital âQâ in the title. Since we normally use lowercase letters only, everyone will think this is a mistake, haha.
âsecond callâ
One of the oldest songs on the album. Maarten wrote the lyrics pretty late for this one. Still, we played it live several times, just singing along in his so called âfantasy Englishâ. It would’ve clearly fit on our last album since itâs more upbeat than most of the others.
âhereâs to youâ
Some lyrics of this song are stolen from a pretty well-known U.S. rapper. OMG! Hope he wonât notice. In fact, rappers sample so much, we think we can do this without feeling bad about it. You want to know what it is? Canât tell.
âtake whatâs leftâ
Departing a little from the other, slower songs of the album. It originates more from where we all come from, which is hc/punk music. Just a short and simple song: aggression, anger, passion â and forever âweâll just run over youâ.
âbegging youâ
âOur most important songâ according to Franky, our guitar player. Apart from the âMy Girlâ reference in the beginning, it features a great guitar solo with shitloads of reverb. We made our first ârealâ video for this one. In order to transport the feeling of being on your own, we filmed it in an abandoned village near Cologne. The people living there were relocated so that a large company can dig for coal. The village has a really spooky vibe and the police patrol regularly so nobody destroys anything. Recording this song was no fun.
âtripped relationshipâ
This song has a classy broken heart theme, but with metaphors of the solar system weâre part of. So trippy. Maybe thatâs why thereâs a rattlesnake in it.
âwild swimmingâ
We had a cover for the album early on: a picture taken when we went swimming in a lake on a sunny day on our way home after a show in Hamburg. Unfortunately, when we did the final design years later it turned out that the pictureâs resolution wasnât high enough. Luckily, a friend of us was on that same lake exactly the same day as us â and he had his DSLR with him. The song itself is about these moments when you âgo wildâ like when you break into an open air swimming pool at night or do other crazy stuff that makes you feel unstoppable.
âthe wayâ
This song was a real pain in the ass to write. There were like thousands of different versions and we never could agree on one. Two weeks before we went to the studio we just rewrote the whole song in a few minutes. All agreed on it and weâre still happy with the outcome. Especially live we really enjoy playing this song. Itâs ridiculous how much time we spent rewriting the same song over and over again.
âmoonâ
We recorded all songs live at the 79 Sound Studio in Cologne (MĂźlheim), but this one was different from all the others. It was originally demoed as a song with electronic drums and synthesizers and it ended up with Maarten playing bass and Christoph on drums in the recording booth alone, recording the first track of this album. We also added some 808 claps which are barely audible, but seem to be very important. They hint at how the song was intended to sound in the first place.
âthe faultâ
One of the last songs we wrote for the album and a personal favourite of ours. We think it sticks out among the other songs, not just because of the cello. Sometimes itâs these last minute songs that end up being the best ones. We donât know if we will ever be able to play it live, though.
âvoidâ
It took forever to write a c-part for this. We ended up having two c-parts. Crazy, right?! It also took forever to record the vocals for this part, which we had to track at Maartenâs tiny flat in several sessions in order to get the right timbre out of his sore throat. âThere is a void no one can fill.â
âwild swimmingâ is released on June 10th via Yo-Yo Records, and is available to pre-order now.