“Though it’s not an original thought, it’s worth reminding everyone: being in a band today is tough. The democratisation of music is fantastic in many respects, but does mean people are used to hearing music free, on Spotify, YouTube, and so on. For bands, shunning these platforms is not an option, so the challenge is really to find new ways to get music across to people without being purely digital (which lacks the personal touch) or physical (lots of people don’t even have the ability to play CDs or vinyl).”
“So, the Compass Tour in its infancy was an idea to address that. We recorded four tracks earlier this year, and rather than releasing them as an EP (‘Band Releases EP’ doesn’t make a good headline), we decided to release four singles in four months with a mini-tour supporting each track. These tours have taken us to the North, East, and South of the UK, with the final West tour coming up in early December.
This has been great, but didn’t solve the problem of actually selling our music—for this, we recruited the genius designer Wayne Pashley from The Little Inkwell, who made postcard designs for each single based on the mineral feldspar at a crystalline level. At a gig if you buy the four postcards, you also get a download code which gives you access to the four singles, meaning you get physical artwork but digital music—sort of the best of both worlds. Of course, it is also possible to use the artwork as postcards which is really old-school viral marketing.
The singles themselves aren’t thematically linked, but taken all together do give a good account of Feldspar. Lyrically, there’s a range of themes—heartache, lust, mortality, anger, whilst musically we’ve achieved a good balance between moments of hushed beauty and raucous electric noise.
Though we’ve been playing together a couple of years, we’re still a relatively new act in terms of recordings: these singles are only the second extended recording session we’ve done, so a large part of the process has been finding a way of converting our live set—which is where we thrive—into a recorded sound that reflects our live intensity and energy, so it feels as if we’re playing in the room with you.
These recordings are the first time we’ve all been happy as a band with the coherence of the sound between tracks, and we’re extremely excited about working on a full length album in the new year. As well, of course, as some sort of unique way to sell it. Got any ideas? Answers on a postcard.”
—Will Green, lead vocals and guitar
