In The Studio: Taking Form

The Joy Formidable’s Ritzy discusses her band’s bedroom-made debut…

Studio: Their flat in south London
Producer: The Joy Formidable/Neak
Confirmed tracks: ‘The Magnifying Glass’, ‘The Everchanging Spectrum Of A Lie’, ‘A Heavy Abacus’, ‘The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade’
Due: Autumn

Hi Ritzy, we hear that recording has been quite a fractured process for you?

It’s been a very broken up process because we did such a lot of touring at the end of last year. In some respects, it’s been quite frustrating. We’d just about get a bit of momentum going in the studio and then we’d have to break away to tour. On the one hand it’s cool having the two side by side, but when you’re itching to get what are just demos or abstractions or just bits of songs written, it’s a little bit frustrating. Just before Christmas we shut down on the touring front and had a really good lockdown for two months. It felt really great because we’d been wanting to sink our teeth into it for ages, and it kind of felt all the better for it because we hadn’t been able to from the start.

So you had some space to get away from it. That must have been weird really wanting to be in the studio and not being able to just knuckle down…

Yeah, you get a little bit involved in the songs, then you come away from it. Even though you’re frustrated because you want to follow on with it, maybe there’s some sort of thought process that happens on the road. But it was ok. It was definitely nice to finally be able to do all the things we wanted to do to it…

With that in mind, is it how you imagined how it would sound before you started?

We had a really solid idea of how we wanted it in some respects – the production, and how we wanted to move on from [mini album] ‘A Balloon Called Moaning’ – but I don’t think we went in with a set agenda either. I think we were still very much ready to fuck about within each of the songs. On listening to it now, it’s certainly everything that we wanted it to be.

What we’ve heard so far is quite climactic and noisy…

It is, yeah! It’s still self-produced, in the eight months since ‘A Balloon…’ we’ve certainly learned a few tricks in terms of the way we do things, and how to make things a bit easier on ourselves in some ways. It’s certainly been nice putting that into practise. And it definitely sounds louder and wider than ‘A Balloon…’ We’ve learned that there are some good things that come from our limitations. Where we record – in our bedroom – it’s quite a modest set-up, there isn’t much scope for drafting in an orchestra or anything. We’ve enjoyed trying to push it as far as we could, with what we’ve got. I think it’s very, very guitar-based. A lot of the sounds that you would think were different instruments are pretty much all guitars. We loved pushing that instrument in as many different ways as we could!

So in terms of instrumentation, it’s grunge instrumentation and everything else can fuck off?!

It’s nice to get so many different tones out of such a simple setup. I think most people who hear it will recognise it as being a traditional guitar album.

What themes are you attacking, lyrically?

Over time, I think that the voice of the band becomes a lot more clear. Lyrically, this album felt very easy. There’s a sense, for me, that I know what every single line of the album means. It’s all personal. I quite like that sense of lyrics keeping a sense of ambivalence; I like when people sense that you mean something without you saying it.

Has anyone ever really badly misinterpreted one of your lyrics?

Not as far as I’m aware, although we’ve not printed our lyrics before. It wasn’t a massive conscious decision. When we did the first print of ‘A Balloon…’ I don’t think we even put a tracklisting in either…

There’s no printer hooked up to the computer in your bedroom then?!

Ha! I think we were thinking more about the music…