It’s been three long years since the Maccabees released Given to the Wild, and they are finally back with their newest album Marks To Prove It, and they are confident it’s their best work yet. We caught up with Felix White to talk the record, the gap between, and what it means to tour an album.
Still a few weeks out from its official release, a couple of teasers have been released for Marks To Prove It, and if the title track is anything to go by, this is shaping up to be album of the year material.
White talked through the process and the band’s feelings on the upcoming record, saying, “It’s probably the most tricky record we’ve ever made, we made it ourselves in our own studio, without any outside help at all, so it took us longer than we thought it would, but it is, I think it’s the best Maccabees record by quite a long way, and I think it sums up our band in a way that we’ve never been able to do before.” He went on to add, “Perhaps because we’ve been out for so long, the album conceptualises us in a good way.”
Largely taking inspiration from their studio’s location in Elephant and Castle, Marks To Prove It is loosely based on a night out, what its soundtrack would sound like from start to finish as morning dawns again.
“We still passionately believe that a record should tie itself together as a full record, so we try to maintain ourselves as an album band. We’d love people to listen to records a bit more in their entirety still, I think that’s an art form that’s a bit lost.”
When comparing the track selection to their last album from 2012, White said, “Given to the Wild was a sort of collation, it was sort of scrapbooked from different recordings that we pieced together.” Whereas Marks To Prove It has a much more deliberate sound, “It just took a long time to work out what we thought it was going to be, and what we actually sounded like, and what the idea was. We did a lot of recording before we found out what that sounded like.”
The new album is set to be comparatively more stripped back than Given to the Wild, a straight up piece of musicianship that can be played start to finish. “It was only a year into the process we realised it was going to sound as much like the room as possible, there was going to be no layering of vocals, no layering of guitars, it was going to be as direct as we could afford it to be, and that just took a while to work that out.”
The Maccabees have been open about their roadblocks, that Marks To Prove It was a much longer project than anyone had anticipated. White delved a little into one of the reasons the album process was slower than usual; “What normally would happen [when producing an album] is your label will give you some money, and you’ll give it to your producer, and say ‘deliver the record by then’ so it’s their responsibility to deliver the album… No one was saying ‘it has to come now’ so it just goes on, and on, and particularly because we didn’t have the studio for just the week, we had our own place where we could be every day, so you kind of go down a worm hole of time a little bit with that.”
Despite the difficulties, White and the rest of the band aren’t disappointed that the album hasn’t come sooner or in a different package: “I’m glad we did it the way we did, because I think it’s a really special record.”
When asked whether there was a sense of nervousness about the upcoming release, with Given to the Wild so popular, and such a gap with anticipation constantly brewing, White responded simply, “I feel like we’ve got really ownership over this record, it sounds like our place, we’ve done it all ourselves, so I think, there’s something really tangible about it, we don’t feel nervous about that at all, it’s there to be celebrated.”
[include_post id=”454081″] Given the group’s initial confidence about the speed of a new album off the back of Given to the Wild, White was happy to joke about their potential (and hopefully inevitable) next album, joking, “I think we learned our lesson this time around, I don’t think we’re going to be thinking about the next one for a while… I think if we’ve learned anything, it’s enjoy where you’re at now, you’ve just got to make the most of Marks To Prove It now.”
“But the way I see it as well, is playing a record live is a celebration of it. And making a record can be quite a tough experience for us, so I think that’s what I’m really keen on for the next year is just to celebrate it and when the music comes and it builds really naturally, that it can be a joyful thing.”
With their schedule packed tight for the rest of the northern hemisphere summer, White was hesitant to confirm any potential Australian dates, but did comment, “Especially as we’ve heard Triple J are really playing the songs a lot, which is great, we’d love to, but I think it’s going to have to be the end of the year… But there are plans to come back yes.”
