“It’s A Different Kind Of Euphoria” bdrmm Interviewed
Less than five years ago, bdrmm stood at the forefront of a shoegaze renaissance. Drenching their strums in distortion, the Yorkshire-born band took influence from 1980s goths and 1990s alt-rockers to create their own sound, equal parts dark and dreamy. They put out their debut record with Sonic Cathedral and entranced audiences in bedrooms and festival fields alike with hypnotic melodies and pedalboards packed tight. But there was always something else brewing beneath the shoegaze-tinted surface.
bdrmm were never quite content with being a straight-forward guitar band. It’s a classification that they began to kick away from on their sophomore record, 2023’s ‘I Don’t Know’. Those moody guitars and distinctive vocals that characterised their debut still remained, as did those continual nods to Thom Yorke – both as Radiohead frontman and solo producer – but the group looked to broaden the scope of shoegaze with atmospheric electronica and pulsing beats. ‘I Don’t Know’ acted as a bridging point between the band’s fuzzy, bedroom-borne roots and something more synth-driven.
—
—
In the words of their trusted producer Alex Greaves, bdrmm are now on the verge of releasing the album that they’ve always been threatening to make. ‘Microtonic’, the group’s third full-length offering, is the purest execution of their sonic vision so far. Through spoken word segments, skittish drum beats, and dreary dystopian lyrics, Bdrmm foray into more cinematic territory, expanding their ‘90s influences to include the likes of Massive Attack, Portishead and Trent Reznor. And although ‘Microtonic’ sits in a completely new realm, perhaps more suited to drip down walls of an underground club than The New Adelphi, it’s no less dense or mesmerising than the band’s early work.
“This record feels like what you guys have been building to,” Greaves comments as we settle into Studio 2 at The Nave, cuppas in hand but soon to be forgotten in favour of conversation, “but I don’t think it’s as much of a departure from what you’ve done before as some people might think. To me, it still has all the hallmarks of a bdrmm record. It’s headphone music. It’s immersive.”
He’s addressing brothers-turned-bandmates Ryan and Jordan Smith, who have been familiar faces around The Nave for years now. Bdrmm have recorded all of their records so far in this converted church situated on the outskirts of Leeds, and Greaves has been present for each one. As a result, their relationship is far closer than you might usually expect for a band and producer, and, fortunately, their tastes have grown in alignment too.
“We were into the same music when we made album one, and we’re still into the same music now,” Greaves explains, “the idea of making a much more electronic record with these guys was something that I thought they would do and should do.” Although Greaves and the band were on the same page about the idea of pushing into more electronic territory, the vision for ‘Microtonic’ wasn’t always quite so concrete.
—
—
bdrmm came to The Nave with just a trio of ideas, but enough confidence that they were a solid base to spawn a full album. “The last record,” Jordan explains, “everyone’s influences and ideas were so scattered. It came together well in the end, but it felt unfocused. When we started this record, it felt like everyone was on the same page with what we were listening to and what we wanted the record to sound like. It felt that there was less hesitance.”
This newfound confidence to experiment seems to have stemmed from a few places: the coherence of the band’s increasingly electronic influences, the quality of their at- home recording, and the liberating return to writing in bedrooms. “The way that we’ve started working more recently has become so divorced from the way that we’re used to working,” Jordan continues. “We used to just get into a practice room and write with guitars. Now, we all live in different cities, it’s going more electronic and we have the opportunity to work at home with decent gear.”
“Nobody had played it in a room together before it came here,” Greaves adds, “no songs on the record were made that way.”
As bdrmm shrugged off their concerns about how tracks might translate to a live setting, ‘Microtonic’ would become their most experimental endeavour yet. “There was so much restriction from album one to album two,” Ryan comments, “Now, we can just do whatever we want and then we can learn how to do it live.” “Worry about that later,” Greaves reassures him, “And also it’s not my problem.”
While the producer’s input may have ended when he mixed the final moments of ‘Microtonic’, the band have only just begun attempting to take the record from studio to stage. Though this may seem like an arduous task, turning drum beats and layered synths into something as full of live as their previous set, Bdrmm have actually found their own moments of catharsis within that process. “Normally, you’d have the moment in the studio where it feels like all your work has come together,” Jordan explains, “but this feels the other way around. When we play it live, it’s like ‘Fucking hell. All that toil a few months ago completely makes sense now we can play it together.’”
And bdrmm are well aware that they won’t be the only ones rediscovering their live approach. As the feeling of their music shifts, so too does the feeling it provides their audiences, a change they’re all too conscious of in the rehearsal room. “You get a different kind of energy from drum machines than you do from someone physically beating the shit out of a drumkit,” Greaves chimes in, but that energy shift isn’t necessarily a negative one.
“It’s a different kind of euphoria,” Jordan suggests, “in the sense that all the earlier stuff has far more emphasis on how overwhelming the melody is. The new stuff is far more rhythm-based. When you feel Conor lock in with the electronic drums, it completely makes sense. I feel like I want to move more on-stage. I want to dance more.”
—
—
The more danceable quality of ‘Microtonic’ stems from a range of influences, with the band citing everyone from Björk to Four Tet to Massive Attack as inspiring the new record. “A lot of Bristol stuff,” Jordan notices. But their muses aren’t limited to DJs and trip-hoppers from the West Country – the band take influence from the world of film just as much as they look to fellow musicians. “Most of the time, we’re not talking about music,” Greaves acknowledges. “We talk about film and TV 80% of the time, 10% football and 10% music.”
“In the morning, we’d just come in and be like, ‘Oh, what did you watch last night?’” Jordan recalls. “It’s this state that you get into where you’re working and chatting at the same time. It’s that comfortability.” So, what did they watch the night prior? Greaves indulged in the latest episode of Land Man (“Is that the villain of Aquaman?” Ryan quips), Jordan watched Kieran Culkin playing himself (complimentary) in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, and Ryan sat through the “fucking wacky” Personal Shopper.
“It’s this French, very arty film,” he divulges, “Kristen Stewart plays a medium but she’s also a personal shopper, and then she’s in Paris to try and connect with her dead brother who also had the same medium tendencies. And then this woman gets killed and everyone goes invisible…”
The late David Lynch was a particular inspiration on the new record, with Ryan recalling how he would wake up at 5am each day and watch a different film from the auteur’s catalogue, before attempting to write a song that could sit in the same realm. “Those moments make the record,” Jordan states.
But the band’s interest in combining music and film extends beyond half-asleep attempts to recreate Twin Peaks and Eraserhead. Alongside the making of ‘Microtonic’, the band had been toying with the idea of creating film scores themselves, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Trent Reznor and Thom Yorke, as well as label mates Mogwai. “We wanted to try and figure out how to work in film scores,” Jordan explains, “And I think it was the move to Rock Action that pushed us into doing that, seeing people so close to us taking their music into film and TV. I mean, it hasn’t worked yet, but…”
“Probably because we haven’t fucking finished it,” Greaves admits. But there are glimpses at their penchant and potential for film scoring on ‘Microtonic’. The title song in particular sounds like it could slot right into Reznor’s Gone Girl soundtrack, harnessing that same sense of mystery and unease. “The demo was called ‘She’s gone, bro,’ wasn’t it?” Ryan recalls. “Don’t get yourself sued,” Alex jokes.
The band’s preoccupation with fiction bled into Ryan’s approach to lyricism on this record, too. On their first two albums, the frontman allowed his own experiences to drive his writing, ripping thoughts and feelings from diary entries and pasting them over all-encompassing guitars. “Is this what I’ve become?” he wonders on one of their most popular older tracks, ‘Gush’. But the making of Microtonic called for something fresh.
“I was just completely done with that,” Ryan affirms, “because I’ve run out. Before I’d written the first album I was writing everything that was fucking going through my head down, thinking, ‘This could be something. Now, I’m feeling more confident to draw from the past. I don’t have to go, ‘Oh, what am I feeling right now?’ I’ve collected enough ideas.”
“Did you get happy?” Alex asks, “Was that the problem?”
Fortunately – or unfortunately – there was enough external misery for Ryan to pull from for lyrical inspiration. “I’m so drawn to dystopia as a theme,” he explains, “and to be so close to living it, I found it easier to write the lyrics. It didn’t feel as forced as it always has been, which is quite nice. Usually there’s a lot of thought that has to go into dredging up bullshit for other people to listen to. It was nice to have the outside to draw in from.”
The band also drew directly from literature, citing Mark Fisher’s hauntological works and Franz Kafka’s surreal Metamorphosis as specific influences. “I was reading a lot of Mark Fisher at the time,” Joran remembers, “and those literary devices really bled into the instrumentation too. For ‘In The Electric Feels’, I was just thinking of the hidden electricity in a city, all the power behind the walls…”
The result – on ‘In The Electric Field’ specifically – is a dingy, street-lit sound, effortlessly cool yet so clearly pored over in its intricacy. Meanwhile, Ryan shrugs off emotionally-driven tales in favour of dense imagery and nihilism, capturing the feeling of it all in the final verse of the first track. “There’s nothing left, nothing to resume, it’s not about me, it’s all about you.” Fittingly, it’s not even Ryan’s voice that introduces us to the record – it’s Working Men’s Club frontman and close collaborator Syd Minsky-Sargeant.
“Ryan’s voice is quite synonymous with the band’s sound,” Jordan acknowledges, “but we’re not afraid to take it out. We’ve always thought that our musicianship is what shines through in the band really. Someone said to me that you can feel the love in the way we make music, because it feels so strewn over, or so picked at.”
—
—
Despite the dreary, dystopian nature of the lyrical choices this time around, bdrmm’s love for their craft was more present than ever on the making of ‘Microtonic’. While While Jordan and Ryan remember struggling through the second record, doubting lyrical choices and trying desperately not to buckle under the pressure of a sophomore release, the making of their third record was euphoric in every sense of the word.
“It’s really weird how I’d consider this our darkest record, but all of us were just so happy while making it,” Jordan shares, “We had the first album, which was the honeymoon phase for us. The second one, there were a lot of personal issues going on at that time and it was tough. We didn’t even think we would be a band at that point.”
“I think it’s important to say that the feelings you had going into this record as a band were very different to the last one,” Greaves responds, “You felt a lot of pressure with the last one. With this one, you just fell into writing music.”
That zeal for creation even seeped into the realm of marketing and campaigning, although Ryan visibly cringes at the word. The record was announced alongside the launch of fake pharmaceutical company MicroTech, which Jordan suggests gave drummer Conor a creative outlet. “We’ve always been wanting to do something that’s a bit more interesting,” Jordan acknowledges, citing Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero stunt as an example.
“I think with the concepts surrounding dystopia, it was just waiting to have that kind of campaign pushed on it,” Ryan states, “Usually, when you’re doing a music campaign it is a bit monotonous, so it was it was a bit of fun for us to do somet a bit silly.”
The surrounding campaign, and bdrmm’s hand in it, only serves as further proof that ‘Microtonic’ is their most fully-realised project so far. Obtaining the perfect balance between dance beats and creeping dystopia, it’s an album that shows off Bdrmm at their best, both behind the scenes and on record.
—
—
‘Microtonic’ is out on February 28th.
Words: Elle Palmer
Photo Credit: Stew Baxter
—
