After being knocked back by the dreaded pandemic, KOYO are back with their third album, Onism. These past few years have seen the band discover themselves, and learn where they want to go with their music. KOYO have come back with confidence and an incredible new sound. In this interview, KOYO’s Huw Edwards talks about the new album, live music, and surviving the pandemic as a smaller band.
Get to know KOYO…
“We’ve been going for a fair while. We started gigging in 2017. Me and the synthesist started it in 2015 together and we were just writing together in our bedroom for two years and then we started gigging. We were gigging pretty solidly for two years and then COVID happened, which kind of slowed us down. We put one album out and we got quite a lot of momentum off that first album. We were doing Download, Reading and Leeds and various festivals, and kind of did a tour and things were going really well. And then, brakes kind of got slammed on and a lot of the people we were working with moved on to different jobs, and unfortunately our second album we released literally before lockdown, so we didn’t even get to tour it or anything. So it was almost like starting again.
We’re really proud of our second album, but we didn’t get to do any gigs or anything. We kind of had to just stop and then and we were like, ‘Oh, what do we do now?’ And then we just took a bit of time out and then thought, ‘Let’s just write another album and then release that,’ and just took our time with it really.
And then, yeah, here we are… we’re finally releasing it. It’s been a long journey because we’ve crowdfunded this one. We did a crowdfunder on Kickstarter last November. Setting all that up took ages because we wanted to do it properly and have a lot of things sorted, like the artwork and everything so it looked like the real deal. And it went really well. It’s just nice to finally have something that we can put out and it feels fresh and we can get behind it, and feel excited about it.”
On Onism…
“We’ve just written music that felt exciting to us, rather than being influenced too much by what direction we felt we needed to go in or whatever. Our first album was very progressive, like prog rock, basically. And then the second album, we tried to kind of streamline it a little bit more. We had a producer, Mike Horner, who mixed this one, but he kind of came in and helped produce the second one, as well as mix it. And like he does a lot of different styles, but his roots are very much more in pop and rock and stuff, like pop rock. We learned a lot from him. He kind of helped us become better songwriters and really helped us trim the fat from all our songs. It was an amazing experience.
But with this new one, we were kind of at a crossroads of like, where do we go now? Do we keep going more in that direction and like becoming even poppier? Or do we just go the opposite direction, and because we didn’t want to, we felt like we were having a bit of an identity crisis. It felt like we didn’t want to put an album out if we didn’t really feel sure of what it was. Because our last album was really eclectic already. We just want to nail like one sound and just get it consistent throughout the whole album. We were like, let’s just go the opposite way… it’s just really progressive again, but heavier, darker, but it’s got like a consistent vibe, we feel like through the whole thing. Most of the songs were based off just like a riff. We were just high fiving in the studio, back to how we were when we were younger. Just being really excited about a shredding solo or a riff. But again, we are obviously older, and hopefully wiser than when we did the first album. So it is naturally more evolved.”
On the lead up to Onism’s release…
“I think it’s exciting, I’d say, because the first and the second album was definitely daunting. Obviously, we’re not a huge band at all, so it’s not like we were really struggling with second album syndrome, like our first one was like some huge hit or whatever. But it was definitely that sort of thing… we put the pressure on ourselves. And with this one, we just made an album that we were really excited about, and made us excited. We’re genuinely really behind the music. We just can’t wait for people to hear it.”
On the success of the Onism Kickstarter…
“It’s awesome, the fact that we got over the line. After everything had happened during COVID, we were obviously a little bit, like a lot of bands, feeling a bit down in the dumps, especially with the timing of our second album and everything. So it was just nice to finally have something happen that was just good news. And to feel like there were people out there that wanted to support us and kind of gave us permission as well to be like, now let’s do this. People want to hear it, and it just felt good.”
On ‘Attention’ and the Satanic Offerings collection…
“We’ve just made a CD that we offered to the Kickstarter backers, so they’ll get that. But we got more in than the amount that got pre-ordered, so we’ll just put them up on our website, so anyone can just get hold of it. Maybe further down the line, we’ll put it on Spotify, if we feel like there’s a demand to have it on there. It’s like 17 tracks, and they’re all just demos that are left from the previous two albums.”
On ‘La Cucaracha’ and ‘Mechanical Bull’…
“I think we’re just influenced by so many different things. So, naturally, that just ends up coming out. Even when we try to write two songs, and make them the same, they end up sounding really different. But ‘La Cucaracha’, maybe subconsciously, we wrote that to be the first song on the album. We were going for that very, expansive kind of song. And then ‘Mechanical Bull’, obviously brings it back down a little bit with a bass line, and it’s more of a groove, and the vocals are more at the forefront.
People always say they love seeing us live. That’s our strength, so we’re always trying to capture that on our recordings, but we feel like we’ve never quite nailed it. So with this one, we were trying to capture that raw energy, and we thought it’d be cool to do a song that was less driven by the vocals, because live, we just go off and jam some sections for way longer than on the album. We’re always really inspired by bands like Led Zeppelin, who if you go see, it would never quite be the same as the record each time. It makes it kind of special when you watch those kinds of bands.
We released those two to the Kickstarter backers, to promote the Kickstarter already, last year, because we mixed the first three songs on the album before the rest of the album. So we had something to be like, this is what it’s going to sound like, and we need your help to finish it off and mix and master the rest of the album. So because they were already out there, and we hadn’t promoted them or sent them out to anyone outside of our circle, we were just like, let’s just put them out to kind of get the ball rolling officially on like streaming services and officially release them.”
The Onism track that Huw is most excited for…
“Yeah, the fourth song on the album, ‘Electric Eel’, which we’re going to release. We’re releasing another single on the 6th of September, which is ‘Hooked’, and then we’re going to release ‘Electric Eel’ in October. That’s probably my favourite song on the album. A lot of people that have listened to the album seem to like that one as well. So I’m really excited to get that one out.”
On surviving the pandemic as a smaller band…
“We really felt like we had so much momentum after the first album, like so many doors felt like they were opening and stuff, and played some awesome gigs. We did Download, Reading and Leeds, Rambling Man, Live at Leeds. We did loads. And then, we got like a booking agent and we were doing UK tours and everything felt like it was going our way. And then we went in and did the second album. We felt like we’d convinced ourselves that this album was going to go huge and all that. And obviously the timing was just like the worst we could have dreamt of. So, yeah, it massively knocked our confidence.
And we considered throwing in the towel at one point because we just felt like it was going to be so hard to get back into that rhythm. Our booking agent had moved on by the time things opened up again. He wasn’t even working at the same company anymore. I think the company actually just stopped… ceased to exist. Just loads of people like that moved on to other jobs. The doors just kind of closed. And by the time things opened again, it kind of felt like you’re not that new band anymore because it’s like years had passed. It’s taken a long time for us to kind of get that confidence back, really, but we’ve definitely got it back now.”
On live music plans…
“When the album comes out, we’re doing a small run of Northern dates in the UK. They’re all kind of getting announced at the moment, but on October 31st, we’re doing the album release show in Leeds. Then we’re playing York the night before. And then Blackpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle, which is still pending, but it’s going to be announced soon. And then, we’re going to do Southern dates in February, which we’ve not actually officially announced yet, but we’re hoping to announce them around the time of the album release. So we’re hoping to do London, Brighton, Bristol, Leicester, places like that.”
Final notes…
“Check out the gigs, and the album is coming out on the 1st of November. We’ve got singles out in September and October, and then we’re going to release one final single along with the album as well.”
Onism out November 1
