Lip Filler drummer Nate takes questions from Soundsphere’s Dom Smith about the band’s forthcoming new material, and creative influences…
How are you doing?
Doing absolutely wonderful. Feels great to be releasing music again, writing new stuff all the while, trying out a bunch of new ideas. Got that anticipation of summer in the air, brighter mornings, longer evenings. A lot to be hopeful for and a lot to look forward to. How are you? You don’t have to answer that.
Talk to us more about witchescrew as a concept/idea and what it means to you?
The name witchescrew is based on a spooky story that the boys love to tell. So imagine: you’ve just moved into your new house. All your stuff’s still in boxes, you’ve got no food so there’s a load of takeaway boxes strewn all over the floor. Instead of settling in you decide to invite a load of strangers in your house for a few drinks. Then they basically start speaking their own language that kinda sounds like parseltongue. Then you get scared and have to ask them to leave. You swear from that day forward that they were witches. And that’s what the EP is about, letting things into your life when you probably shouldn’t have, but having some fucking good stories to tell. That story is 100% true by the way.
It feels like this new material is a darker and heavier period for the band than the earlier stuff (tracks like ‘CARLING’) – would that be accurate?
Absolutely. It’s a lot more personal, more gritty. George has been getting all up in his feels which is great to be able to work with and is probably why it’s much more dark and heavy. CARLING is a bit of an outlier though, I think he wrote the lyrics when he was 15 or 16 over a beat he made. Then it was brought into the band and turned into what it is now. Our producer St Francis Hotel managed to whack it up a notch as well, blasting all the drums down a really echoey hallway. The neighbours weren’t too happy about that. But yeah, the production aesthetic is definitely darker. Think Yungblud getting some really bad news right before his 11pm set at Venue MOT.
What would you say the biggest challenges the band are facing right now are, I know you’ve moved a bunch, and there was a lot of chaos for a while?
Yeah yeah, lots of sofa surfing. Feels like a typical London lifestyle though, no one’s really exempt, especially if you’re just out of uni. I’d probably say the hardest challenge for us is balance. It’s so easy to get distracted by working full time, and equally easy to get distracted staying up until 4am working on your next indie electronica fusion masterpiece. But then you wake up and realise it’s a piece of shit and you’re late for work. Love all those extra hours off though.
What are your other creative influences outside of music at the moment – think movies, people and places for example?
I’ve been reading a bit of Shelley. George loves Dune 2. Theo’s still buzzing off his recent visit to Thorpe Park. Verity’s loving English Weather. Not the FEET song, just how spring can’t make up its mind. She also loves the song as well though. I don’t know what Jude’s doing, probably clipping his toenails.
How important is the visual aspect of the band? There are some cool images and videos you guys have created!
We’ve started taking it a lot more seriously with witchescrew. EP1 was more of a literal translation of where we were at the time, we were all sharing a house together, so you’ve got the fridge as the cover which looked like that all the time. But essentially we’ve got a lot of ambition as to what we wanna do with our music, almost to the point where we don’t even know what it’s gonna be like. That means making our general image more opaque and a bit more mysterious. Keep an eye out for all the symbols.
You’ve got some tour dates coming up – what are the biggest challenges of taking your sound out to the live arena?
To be honest we’re not that worried about our sound in a live context, we’re all producers so we’re very confident about it on our end. But then you have different venues where the sound behaves differently and we haven’t got our own soundie so parts of it are out of your control for a band our size. We’re a lot more focussed on playing the tightest set we can with as much energy as possible. People come out and give us their time and money so we give it our fucking all. I think that’s a pretty good trade off. This involves some very high-risk and completely confidential pre-show rituals too. Don’t ask, you don’t wanna know.
Is there anything else you’d like to plug that I may have missed before we finish?
I think we’d just love to plug our incredible team. Without all the support we’ve got from them we’d still be spamming venue reps for shows. John, Joolz, Will, Jade, Pete, Lily, Joly, Stuart, James. You’re all marvellous people and all incredibly well dressed. Go give our second EP witchescrew a listen on May 24th. And for as many days after that before your friends hold an intervention.
