junodream match DIY ethics to towering ambition. The group’s songwriting may be lavish at times, almost cinematic, but there’s a pop core. It’s about connection, at the end of the day.
Debut album ‘Pools Of Colour’ lands on January 26th, with junodream attempting to make each passing single sound like a real statement. The project’s latest release – ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ – is uniquely intriguing, a superb blend of the humble and the extraordinary.
An off-piste pop song, ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ was constructed at the group’s hub – their self-contained, hand-built studio space, Shabby Road. Neat pun, but an even better base for their odd-pop invention.
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In the words of guitarist Tom Rea, it’s “a haunting and constrained song, bursting at the seams…”
He continues:
To capture the claustrophobic core of the song, we paired our usual dreamscape guitars with an extremely dry and rustic sounding nylon guitar, (a cheap six-string acoustic that we forged into a half-classical, half-acoustic). Re-amping this then pushed the song into an even smaller box. The vocals, not only demo vocals, but also re-amped through an ARP-2600 and Thermionic Culture-Vulture. Boxy.
Beyond the core instrumentation, we then smothered the song with haunting sounds (glockenspiels, toy keyboards, AMS non-linear reverbs etc). In terms of the drums for ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’, we went for the old-school method of simply bashing through the song in a single take. Frantic and chaotic live energy tying in with the emotion running throughout the song.
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For singer Ed Vyvyan, ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ comes from a very real place, where you feel like “the walls are closing in from every direction. But very, very slowly.”
He adds: “It’s excruciating for a long period of time, and then it just boils over. You can have these earth shatteringly horrible arguments in the most mundane of places. Your bedroom, the park, your kitchen. This song is an expression of that anger and sadness, wrapped in a junodream bow.”
We’ve been granted access to their inner realm, with a series of photos direct from Shabby Road documenting the creative process. Check out the imagery up top, and dial in to ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ below.
