Via NME
In June, Death From Above 1979’s singer, lyricist and drummer Sebastien Grainger told NME that if the press don’t like their long-awaited comeback record – due for release on September 5 – It’s their own fault because they’ve been “fucking asking for it”. Today, speaking from his home in Los Angeles, he wants to clear something up, “We didn’t make this record because people wanted us to or because we saw some sort of commercial opportunity,” he says. “We made this record because it felt right.”
The duo may have taken their time finding the opportune moment – it’s 10 years since the release of their only previous album, the cult classic ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ – but ‘The Physical World’ doesn’t stray too far from what made fans fall in love with them first time around. It’s a dance record for punks and a punk record for dancers, marked by bassist Jesse F Keeler’s muscular riffing and Grainger’s subversive lyrical wit. “When we started out we were coming out of a scene that was about math-rock and various subgenres of hardcore,” explains Grainger. “We wanted to be as straight-ahead as possible. We wanted to be the AC/DC of hardcore. That’s still one of our goals.”
Sebastien tells the story behind every track from the Canadian duo’s long-awaited new album…
TRACK 1 CHEAP TALK
“The riff was the last thing Jesse had written before we broke up in 2006. He’d had it in his luggage for a while, trying to use it for other projects like MSTRKRFT but never finding a home for it. When we started playing together again in 2011, I played along to it right away. It was a Death From Above orphan for a few years, but we’ve given it some good parents and raised it up.”
TRACK 2 RIGHT ON, FRANKENSTEIN!
“There’s a promoter in Toronto called Dan. He’s a mythic figure. He was a journalist who had severe addiction problems and ended up being fired from his job. He put us on in the early days. One day we were in a bar and Dan walks in reciting this poem. The last line was ‘Right on, Frankenstein!’ It’s stuck with me for years, and it fit here so perfectly.”
TRACK 3 VIRGINS
“This one felt like something we would have been really excited about on our first EP. It felt like all of our Deep Purple dreams come true. The lyric is subversive and doesn’t really mean what people think it means. It’s mostly about adolescence and innocence, nostalgically looking back to that time that’s pre-sex but hyper-sexual, when you’re figuring out gender politics and trying to navigate that.”
TRACK 4 ALWAYS ON
“A song about how technology means that no-one can get away from anything anymore. I was talking to my wife about Twitter, the media, cellphones and the internet, and I blurted out that if we brought Kurt Cobain back to life this morning he’d be dead by the afternoon. He wouldn’t last a day. People ask: “What would Kurt Cobain do if he were alive today?” He’d blow his head off.”
TRACK 5 CRYSTAL BALL
“We wrote this at a soundcheck in Manchester. We’d been cooped up and we finally had a chance to while away the time with our instruments. For a long time it was called ‘Manchester’. It was just one of those songs that worked right away, Jesse was playing that riff and I played the part. The lyrics came afterwards – it’s a love song.”
TRACK 6 WHITE IS RED
“This is a journey song. I started with the lyric ‘Frankie was a heartbreaker’ and then this story emerged. It’s one of the most concise narrative lyrics I’ve ever written. It’s a bit Springsteen because it’s a wandering ballad and a car song. Jesse’s riff totally sounded like Sonic Youth when he first played it. I don’t think we’ve ever been bashful about referencing Sonic Youth.”
TRACK 7 TRAINWRECK 1979
“This was inspired by an actual trainwreck that happened in my hometown in the year I was born. There was a huge chemical spill and it became a sort of fable where I grew up. I heard about it my whole life, and when I started writing this song it resonated with my childhood. I wanted to spell it out. This is what happened: a train exploded and nobody died.”
TRACK 8 NOTHIN’ LEFT
“This was Jesse’s attempt at writing something really easy. It starts with a simple riff, but by the bridge before the chorus we’re already into prog-rock territory. Sometimes we achieve our goals, but sometimes it just backfires. He wanted to make it simple, but by 30 seconds into the tune we’re essentially playing a Yes song. It’s about relationships and sexual politics.”
TRACK 9 GOVERNMENT TRASH
“If you’re a Death From Above fan and you heard ‘Trainwreck 1979’ and thought it was too mellow, this is for you. It’s essentially a heavy metal tune. I think it’s the most ambitious thing Jesse’s ever done. I was encouraging him to play the shit out of his bass, play the craziest thing he could play, and then tried to keep up.”
TRACK 10 GEMINI
“This started with this incredible feedback sound that Jesse played in rehearsal one day. We were in a tiny little room, it was about a million degrees and his bass just started making this sound. He was coaxing it and it was such a terrifying sound. Lyrically, it started as a straight-out love song to my wife, but the chorus morphed into another story.”
TRACK 11 THE PHYSICAL WORLD
“Jesse wrote a riff that sounded like Bach, very symphonic and epic. It’s the marriage of this underlying arpeggio on the synthesizer that’s running through the song and then this heavy metal song on top of it. Musically, it has such a big presence – from the moment we started working on it we knew it would be the last song on the album.”
Thanks to the good folks over at Faster Louder you can stream The Physical World in the digital world in its entirety all this week ahead of the official release on Friday (Sept 5) and if you like what you hear, get your pre-order on at places like iTunes and JB HiFi.
