Album + Track By Track: Lola Colt

Listen to their new album 'Twist Through The Fire' now...

Lola Colt don't hold back.

Live, the band are all poise and precision, channelling their energy towards a joint cause with expert care.

On record, Lola Colt knew when to strike hard. The band's songwriting melded post-punk influences to the rather more deranged side of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, resulting in a potent, black-as-hell, blend.

New album 'Twist Through The Fire' will be released on July 1st, and it's a coruscating, inspired return. Perhaps the band's broadest statement yet, it moves from bad trip psychedelia to lush sonics, punk attitude, and Israeli folk songs.

Clash is a fan, and we've nabbed the full stream before anyone else – check it out below, then catch a track-by-track guide penned by the group after the jump.

Gold
Part Bond theme, part funeral dirge, this song came about in one of those all-to-rare moments where you pick up an instrument and your mood just pours perfectly out. Musically it’s spitefully twisted and torturous, but also weirdly playful. Gun’s lyrics are, as always, heavily veiled and abstract, but deeply personal, and their menacing tone made Gold the kind of track we wanted to open the album with, because it’s the sort of song you can’t ignore. It demands your attention.

Dead Moon Jeopardy
I remember first hearing Gun’s lyrics for what would become this song. They felt ghostly and haunting. Other-worldly somehow. The time signature of the song and the way the sounds are layered up support this with a kind of floating feeling that never quite settles, like it’s spiralling in on itself endlessly ~ and just as you feel you’re getting your balance, you fall into the chorus and are suddenly crawling through this dense, ultraviolet jungle.

Eagle
This song is built around the stompy backbeat and playfully metaphoric lyrics and vocal harmonies. It has these sections of eerie pulsing sparseness that give way to choruses which open up into a light swirling acid haze of interlocking melodies.

Twist Through The Fire
The title track of the album, this song was born from many long late-night sessions ~ written and rewritten countless times until we felt it was right. The end result is a 10 minute journey through Gun’s mind that is really quite impossible to describe. We intentionally built in themes throughout the album, lyrically and musically, to give it a sense of consistency, and one of my favourites is the bass line in the first part of this song, which echoes the choruses of 'Dead Moon Jeopardy'. The themes running through the lyrics also make this feel like a centre piece to the album, and a natural transition between the first and second side.

Moksha Medicine
This is the only instrumental track on the album, and unlike the other songs it came together really fast, being written and largely recorded in a single day. It has a dream-like feel to me, like an old photograph, or walking around the house you grew up in – warm, yet somehow detached. That kind of glowing haze your mind puts around your memory of certain times in your life.

Moonlight Mixing
We wanted to capture some of the energy and rawness of early 60’s garage psych-pop, but put a darker spin on it. For me Gun’s lyrics perfectly capture the way songs from that era had such strong double meanings ~ the kind that walked the fine line between not being flagged as offensive to radio stations, yet spoke directly to their audience. To go further and really explore this we broke with the traditional pop song model halfway through and brought the track right down to focus on the words. The second half of the song is one long build. It begins with an idea inspired by an old Israeli folk song called 'Hava Nagila', and builds into the climax which is one of the few times we reserved on the album to go out all-guns-blazing.

Bones
Ever had one of those days where you just want to smash everything?

At War
A railway runs along the arches at the back of my house, and at night the heavy goods trains rumble past slowly as they creep into the city. I wrote the riff to what would become In War late one night to the rhythm and sound they made. To me it’s therapeutic, but Gun must have found it somehow deeply unnerving because she went on to write one of the most raw and emotional/personal songs on the album from it. I love the contrast she created by doing that. Kilimanjaro This song felt like the perfect end to the album, because you can’t predict it, and you’re left with a kind of ‘did that really just happen, or was it all a dream?’ feeling.

– – –

Catch Lola Colt at the following shows:

July
5 Brighton The Hope & Ruin
6 London Moth Club
7 Bristol The Exchange
8 Nottingham The Chameleon
13 Leeds A Nation Of Shopkeepers
14 Manchester Soup Kitchen
15 Birmingham Sunflower Lounge

Buy Clash Magazine

-
Join the Clash mailing list for up to the minute music, fashion and film news.