The Amazons: “I Want Every Album To Feel Like It Has Its Own Identity”

---

With the release of their third album ‘How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me?’ imminent, the Reading four-piece are set to emerge from the darkness of 2019’s ‘Future Dust’ full of lust for life and post-pandemic hope, promising expansive, uplifting, sun-drenched singalongs produced by Jim Abbiss. We sat down with The Amazons at 2000 Trees to talk about their new album, touring with Royal Blood, and some mystery berries…

Hello, I’m Fraser Kerr, and I’m joined here with The Amazons. How are you guys?

Matt: We’re doing really well. Very well. This is our first 2000 trees, and we’re happy to be here.

Yeah, obviously you were booked for the last few – that couldn’t happen – but you’ve just come off The Forest stage. How was that for you guys?

Matt: It’s good. It was different. We like playing acoustic shows and it was just a pleasure to see this kind of natural amphitheater in the forest, it was cool. It was different.

Chris:Yeah it’s a proper setup, really nicely put together. And everyone watching was like really listening, super respectful, and we appreciated that. So thank you.

Matt: Thank you 2000 Trees.

You’ve obviously got another set coming up later on. How excited are you for that one?

Matt: Yeah, very excited. We just went to see the stage and we’re just hanging back here and meeting up with old friends – I think that’s the best thing about these festivals where, um, you just meet out with people. Like, I mean, we just ran into the guys from You Me At Six, who we toured with in 2016. And we haven’t seen them maybe for three… four years. So it’s just great to rekindle old friendships.

Talking of touring with people you recently toured with Royal Blood. How was that for you guys?

Matt: Oh, it was, it was overwhelming in every sense. It was… quite the baptism of fire to kind of reenter touring. It was the first tour we’d done, and especially at that scale, maybe ever at that scale. So there was a lot of relearning how to tour, like all the tricks of the trade that we kind of developed before lockdown. But I mean, what an opportunity to just, just f**king play in front of arenas, and kind of emerge from our little album three nest.

So obviously touring is a big part of the band. Uh, you’ve got another tour coming up soon with your new album. How was it recording the new album?

Matt: It was cool. It was really cool. We recorded with a producer called Jim Abbiss, in his studio in Cambridgeshire. You know what, it was his studio, so we got a lot more time than we’ve ever had, So we could go down a few rabbit holes and just explore more than we’d ever done before on any previous records, like it felt like a very new and different and fresh experience for us this time around. And I think what we loved about working with Jim is that he was so focused on making the best recording possible, and the best version of every song possible. He wasn’t bogged down in any kind of like musical ideology. Like there was no like purity of like everything has to be recorded in the studio. He was so keen to just… if something sounded good that we’d recorded at Chris’s flat, in the demos then why not keep it? It was really like a freeing experience, and it let us just capture things that we wouldn’t usually have captured.

So how have you found the reaction to ‘Bloodrush’ both on tour and online?

“we’re so deep in this new album that we kind of forgotten what the last album had sounded like”

Matt: It’s good. I mean, we’re so deep in this new album that we kind of forgotten what the last album had sounded like. So when you compare the first single from the second record and the first single from this one, they are pretty different sonically, but we’ve always been a band who always wanna evolve every album. I want every album to feel like it has its own identity, and we want that because it just justifies what’s happening anyway, which is just us growing as individuals and searching and looking and working out new ways write and record new music and new ways to just be who we are. Yeah. And that reflects that.

Talking about the sound of each album, what gets you inspired to start writing the album? and what influences the sounds?

Matt: What gets us inspired? It’s a good question. I think the inspiration and influence question is, an interesting one, because if you think about making music is something that you do in almost this kind of subconscious state of flow way. Those are not really the questions that we’re asking ourselves when we’re writing music. Like if you are [looking at Chris] writing something on the guitar and I’m kind of singing over it or whatever, we’re not going like, “Right. Who’s inspiring us right now?” it’s not really like that kind of thing, but we do listen to a shit load of stuff and we watch a lot of films and we read and we like input a lot of creative stuff and it’s kind of not up to us how it’s outputed.

Chris: Yeah, like I just finished watching the pistol series on wherever it is… Disney plus.

Matt: Disney. Yeah.

Chris: And, uh, we don’t sound anything like the Sex Pistols, but I came outta the back of that with like a little bit of like extra punk in me. And there’s no way that’s gonna come out really obviously in anything we are writing over the next couple of years, but it’s in there somewhere and that’s kind of how it all works with like a nice flower you saw on a walk to really obvious things like the music that we’re loving at the time.

Yeah nice, what got you into music in the first place?

Matt: Oh, that’s a good question. What got us into music in the first place? For me personally, it was hearing a couple of songs on the radio. One being ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and being like “what…?” and it just blowing my mind. And then ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones, heard that on the radio as well – That blew my mind. Watching like ‘Top Of The Pops’ too. and just listening to music with my parents all the time. Um, and well an accumulation of loads of things. It’s really hard to find light bulb moments, but I’d say those things were… and you know what, I think the influence of just slightly older kids doing it, cannot be understated… No, no cannot be overstated, like just having a band in school who were like a couple of years older than you, and doing gigs at the school, there was a band called The Enigma Project at our school, Theale Green in Reading. And we must have been like year seven, eight, or nine. So like 11, 12, 13 years old, and I remember The Enigma Project did a gig in the assembly hall.

Chris: It was like at lunchtime as well.

Matt: It was just an evening, it was in an evening. Um, and I lost my shit. I lost our shit. I mean, there’s one thing, liking music, and then there’s another thing going like, “Whoa, we could do… right. What, what’s the name of the guitar they’re playing? and do they have amps? what are they? how do you do that? Who plays drums in our year?” That kind of thing. Do you know what I mean? Like cannot overstate just people in your town or people in your school just being in bands. Like they’re probably… I think that band that – and they were called The Enigma Project, they turned into a band called Trip Wires, and then that turned into a band called Ulrika Spacek – I think they’re probably the most influential and inspiring band we’ve ever come across.

So talking about school life, What is the most school-like trouble you’ve been in on tour?

“we were in a lot of trouble with our managers at the time”

Matt: Oh goodness… Well, we’re in school-like trouble with our tour manager on the daily. [look over at their tour manager] On the daily. Um, that’s a great question. I mean, we all went missing in Gibralter we played MTV rocks… No, it was MTV Calling Gibralter and Elliot kind of went missing, Chris you went missing. The thing with Gibralter is that, it’s very small and it obviously neighbors Spain. We were staying in a hotel in Spain and of course there’s border control and all that kinda stuff for passports. Chris kind of went missing, during Steve Aoki’s set and we were looking for him for hours and we just gave up and went back to our hotel in Spain. And we were in a lot of trouble with our managers at the time who were kind of trying to get us going, because Elliot had also been taken to hospital for drinking too much champagne and yeah, that was a funny night. And, uh, I think Chris you ended up on a multipurpose runway. It was a plane runway, at an airport, which kind of also had like a bus shelter in it ’cause I guess they’d like staggered the times the airplanes come in, staggered the times the buses come through from Spain, and because, I think Chris, you’d try to get through passport control without your passport, ’cause you were slightly inebriated. You kind of walked back, found a nice comfortable bus shelter fell asleep on that. Got woken up the next morning by a very English policeman saying, “Dude, there’s gonna be planes about to run you over. You cannot sleep here.” That was good School-like trouble.

I recently saw her on your Instagram story that, um, Elliot had some mystery berries… he survived, right?

Matt: Elliot survived… though I haven’t seen him for a while today. So he might have found some more mystery berries. I think there were some sort of cousin of cherries.

Chris: Yeah. They were just lovely, fresh, cherries.

Matt: Filled with… filled with pollution. Yeah, I mean, Elliot – during the album recording – was doing a botany course to keep him sane. So I think that kind of… I think he knew that it would not hurt him. I mean, you ate a little bit as well and your stomach was painful.

Chris: Yeah, it was a little bit spicy, but, yeah, he’s done that botany course. So I think he’ll probably move on to like picking mysterious mushrooms in the forest.

Matt: Oof that’s the next frontier…

Well, that’s all I’ve got for you. Is there anything you guys would like to add?

Matt: Well, our album, ‘How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me’ is out in September. We love it. That’s why we’re releasing it. And we’re on tour in the UK and Europe and the US from October. Excited. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much for joining me.

Matt: Thank you very much.