There’s something quintessentially youthful about Mystery Jets. Maybe it’s the time period they first emerged – fresh out of school, the Underage scene in London blowing up and those vital early singles plastering themselves to our stereo.
But they’re not quite the fresh-faced lads of yore in 2016. Spending almost a decade together, Mystery Jets are now… well, if not elder statesmen then certainly coming close. Based in East London, the band seem to have grown closer over time, allowing experience to rejuvenate them, to add fresh grit to their creative mill.
It’s something guitarist Will Rees muses on in our conversation. New album ‘Curve Of The Earth’ is a defiant return, and it’s impossible to imagine the band making this record at an earlier stage in their career. “We've been through a lot together. And I guess you could say we've grown together. It's not something that's really possible to quantify but we still get along as good friends, and I think we still have respect for each other.”
“Most importantly, perhaps, we like each other's ideas, and we share similar tastes,” he adds. “Often one of us will come in and say, I've heard this new track by this band, check it out! And everyone else would be like, this is amazing, who are these people? We’re still kind of aligned, in that way. We bond like that. And that's a great thing, without that I don't think we'd be able to make music together.”
Music like ‘Curve Of The Earth’. The band owes its genesis to late nights in the United States, with Mystery Jets invited to support Mumford & Sons on a series of epic tour dates. Alone in Nashville, singer Blaine Harrison and Will pondered where to go next.
“We were staying in a weird little motel by a river in Nashville,” he recalls, “and I think we were both pretty drunk on margueritas and we ended up talking about what the next move for the band might be. And we kind of agreed that we wanted to do something that was pretty space rock and something that was grand and could try and deal with subject matters that were outside of our normal comfort zones. That was the first step towards making a record, I suppose.”
Casting their minds back to the records they first fell in love with, Mystery Jets sought inspiration from the freakier ends of Pink Floyd and King Crimson. “Really that was our introduction to music, that was the first thing, certainly, that I ever fell in love with as a kid,” he enthuses. “Those are the albums that I first got obsessed by. I wanted to go back and re-visit that, and re-discover it, really. And tap in to more innocent set of ears that I had, and find that again.”
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Locking themselves away in the studio, Mystery Jets cast their music out into the psychedelic realms of aural space – yet it didn’t quite click. “We weren't happy with it. It was too slow, it was too spacey and it just wasn't going to work. So, yeah: we sacked it off.”
Frustrated, the band wiped the slate clean. But this experience seemed to energise them further, with their exacting process whittling down all manner of ideas into what could easily rank as one of Mystery Jets’ strongest albums. “It's a process of chipping away, you can polish it and polish it until you're basically happy with everything that's on there. And that's how we did this.”
“At the beginning we were way off, we thought we were making a space rock record, but at the end of the day the result – in my opinion – isn't a space rock record at all, it's a very personal album. So you think you're going in one direction but it turns out it's completely the wrong direction, so you have to turn around and go somewhere new. And just try lots of things until you get to the result that you need.”
Will Rees, though, is quick to point out that the band is enormously grateful to be in this position. Able to focus on a space rock album at this stage of their career, then ditching the results in favour of something more personal, is something that few other groups – certainly new groups – could afford to do.
“I'd say things are harder for bands now, in England,” he says. “And I think you can see that because there's less bands breaking through. I'm not really one to say why or how that is, why it's like that, but I think it's definitely very hard to make it as a band in England. Probably even harder in other countries, especially in European countries… it's a tough game. A tough game.”
“Certainly, when we emerged ten years ago there were bands everywhere; there were bands crawling out of every corner of East London, North London, West London, South London. And record deals… it was quite easy to get a record deal then. You just had to look the part and sound alright. Chances are you had a single out on any number of singles labels that were around at that point. And a lot of great music came out of that, definitely. But, y'know, 90% of it is not around today. And I think it's very hard to make it as a band now. Certainly harder.”
But Mystery Jets aren’t about looking backwards. Forever focusing on the latest song, the newest idea, the band want to leave a legacy, to make an impact. “That's all it's about,” the guitarist insists. “Trying to make absolutely incredible music. And I'm not suggesting that we've done that in any particular way but my ambitions, and our collective ambitions, are to make great music. And stop at nothing until we've done that, whether that's in one song or across a whole album. And what drives that is that desire.”
“Different people in the band have a different sense and bring different qualities to the table but I think the feeling of wanting to contribute something good to rock 'n' roll, to music, is shared by all of us. That's the only important thing. That out-lives you, it'll be there when you're not – when you're dead.”
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'Curve Of The Earth' is out tomorrow (January 15th). Catch Mystery Jets live:
February
12 Dublin Whelans
16 London Electric Brixton (NME Show)
18 Birmingham 02 Institute 2
19 Manchester Gorilla
20 Glasgow The Art School
