We hadn’t got a song like that, that starts with the words.” There’s lots of tricks to keep it interesting.”īT: ”It’s quite bold, too. We were listening to a lot of songs that did that-hip-hop does it all the time-and we were like, ‘How do you write a song that’s essentially the same the whole way through?’ We realised how much more complicated it actually is. I paired it with the riff and I was like, ‘Actually, this is really, really sick.’ It was different for us because the song is made up of, essentially, the same riff throughout. That’s brutal.’ I thought of the phrase ‘I Only Lie When I Love You’ and it was so horrible. Someone told me this quote: ‘Women fake orgasms, but men fake relationships.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god. I think I was trying to write songs that sounded like The Hives, a mixture of The Hives and a Jack White song. MK: “I wrote this in an Airbnb in Brighton.
Now fucking finish.’”īen Thatcher: “We were trying to find the blueprint, and when ‘Lights Out’ came, we knew it was a good song and that we just needed to follow up with nine others.” This song, for us, was a big slap in the face, like, ‘Wake up. This has got something to it.’ And I was a bit like, ‘Has it?’ It was nice to have someone who wasn’t in the band, to give us that sense of relief, basically giving you a bit of a hand. One of them was the groove of what would become the verse of ‘Lights Out’. I showed him a few ideas I was working on. MK: “I was doing some writing with a friend of ours, John Barrett, who’s in a band called Bass Drum of Death. It wasn’t until it was on the record that we had time to sit back and go, ‘Oh. Mike Kerr: “I think we probably mixed it and finished it days before the deadline. Here, they guide us through their triumphant 2017 album, track by track. “As soon as we put the chemistry of the band as the priority, that’s when the songs began to come to us.” Kerr and Thatcher put themselves through the wringer, but they got there in the end. “It’s almost like we had to remind ourselves who we were,” says Kerr. How Did We Get So Dark? cemented Royal Blood’s status as a new rock superpower. Their second record’s title might give some insight into Kerr and Thatcher’s warped mindset at the time-“I was in a pretty mad place,” says Kerr-but the songs here chart a thrilling evolution, expanding their drum-and-bass set-up with subtle flourishes of keyboards and Rhodes while retaining the epic minimalism of their debut. Propelled by a breakthrough in the form of the gnarly rock groove of “Lights Out”, they found forward motion. “It became like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” recalls Kerr. It was awesome, but after every high, there’s a low.” “Daunting” is how Thatcher remembers it, and as people around them began to bandy about the phrase “difficult second album”, the duo struggled to generate momentum. “Suddenly, what we thought was a bit of fun, something our mates would hear, had become this traumatically amazing experience. “We were terrified,” Kerr tells Apple Music. The huge success of their self-titled debut in 2014 had thrust bassist and singer Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher into a world of rock stardom they hadn’t planned for, and now they had to follow it up. It took getting to the end of their second album to remind Royal Blood what they loved about being in a band.
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