Beyond The Disco: Clash Meets The Orielles

The bewitching impact of their new album...

Clash met up with The Orielles' own Henry Carlyle-Wade recently, seizing him away from the Halifax four-piece to chat escapism, holidays in space, and the ethos behind their latest album, 'Disco Volador'.

The album itself, released last month, is a beacon of light in current uncertainties, and the sheer outrageousness of releasing their cosmic summery rays on a snowy day in February still rings true mere weeks later as the population is trapped indoors. It is the escapism to zestier days that we all need.

Listening to 'Disco Volador' on your one state-mandated walk a day will transport, catapult you even to anywhere you’d rather be, be it across the space-time continuum or just to a beer garden with some friends (preferably more than two).

Fighting off a serious hangover post-sold-out show on their eight date February/March tour, Henry from the band still manages to illustrate with impressive clarity the band’s vision for their latest project.

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How does it feel to have this second album out in the world?

We are feeling so happy! We have been sitting on these songs for a while and really thought about this record a lot and its musical influences such as Stereolab (an obvious stylistic one), a lot of the jazz-funk coming out of the ’70s, and Brazilian bossa nova – taking inspiration from their chord patterns … so yeah, very diverse.

How have you grown as a band since the first album?

Musically we’ve all grown lots, taking drums lessons for example, and I’ve started studying music theory and jazz to push us forward that way. Developing our actual musicianship is what we are striving towards.

I think also we’ve grown as a band, in the way that we take touring really seriously; putting in the most hours of rehearsal time than we’ve ever done since we were dead small. It's been necessary to actually learn our own songs and how to bring them across in the live set, as there are lots of parts on the album that we recorded separately.

For example, once 'Space Samba' was recorded we initially had no idea how to play it as a band.

How are you finding the tour?

Tour is going really well – evidently because I’m hanging out my arse! We’ve seen a change in how people move to our music with these new songs, people are dancing more and having a big boogie at the front which is wonderful to see, that’s what we want and why we wrote the music.

You all grew up in Halifax, Yorkshire, is there much of a creative or musical scene there at the moment?

When we were starting out the emo scene was alive and well, but there was no cool indie-pop music going on. In the last couple of years there have been some really good bands coming out of there, such as Working Men’s Club, and a band called The Lounge Society – really good.

What does the title of the album mean to you?

Well, that’s a very interesting question, it can mean different things to different people! We originally had a rough title for the album – ‘Boogie to Space, Space to Boogie’ and were writing songs to fit that brief so the album had a sound as a whole.

However, we scrapped that because Es had a frisbee with ‘Disco Volador’ written on the side which is the direct translation for frisbee. Turns out that it literally means flying disc and can mean UFO as well so the title of the album is about a disc moving through space, relating it to releasing a record on vinyl and it traveling, even…flying OFF THE SHELVES.

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Would you go to space if you had the opportunity?

Oh yeah deffo. We think it’ll be a holiday destination soon. All-inclusive? I hope not, cause then I’m not going. If you’re gonna go to a different place you wanna try the local food, the space cuisine, space culture – get involved. We were hoping to find someone that could blast our album into space at some point.

I was reading about the Voyager Golden Record in the 70s which had songs by Beethoven among other artists on it and I thought it was so beautiful.

Do you see the album itself as an escape from Earth? 

We write happy songs because we see music as a vessel where you can make someone feel something, rather than music being a representation of whatever situation you’re in.

We definitely see music as more of escapism and its the same for us as well, so when we are playing we are never thinking about anything else, and that works for us, so we just wanted to translate that to the listeners, and with the current climate and politics at the moment it is necessary.

It’s like what people did in the 90s with raves, ‘it's fucking shit so let’s listen to some loud music and dance for 13 hours.’ That’s kind of the purpose behind why we write the way we do.

Are you planning on doing any more writing in 2020?

We are always playing jams which is where our songs start, but there’s not an immediate urge to write at the moment. We are quite satisfied and happy with letting this album out into the world for a bit first.

There was such an urge to make exactly this record and we knew exactly how we wanted it to sound, even whilst recording the first album we still knew we wanted to make this, but now we need to have a conscious thought about what kind of album we wanna make next before we start writing anything else.

It feels very satisfying for us now having a record out that’s served a purpose. We had such a solid direction on it which I think really helps with the writing, therefore I think we will want to come up with a new idea for where we want our music to go.

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'Disco Volador' is out now.

Words: Megan Warrender

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