Battles

Title: ‘Gloss Drop’

Studio: Machines With Magnets, Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Producer: Battles, Keith Souza & Seth Manchester

Collaborations: Yamantaka Eye (of the Boredoms), Matias Aguayo (Kompakt), Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) and Gary Numan.

Due: June 2011

Label: Warp Records

How have you progressed with this record?

We regressed! I feel like this album that we’ve just completed is a really nice follow-up to ‘Mirrored’. I do feel like it’s a next-level Battles body of work.

Is it in a similar vein?

There are songs that anchor what people might expect from us. We haven’t abandoned ship on the style of the first album, but we’re venturing into newer territory as well. On this album we had the privilege to be able to collaborate with some people who we respect. We wanted to make sure we could maintain a similar vibe to what we’ve done before, but this time elaborate on it.

So how did you do that? Did you make it more electronic, or more band-orientated, or use heavier beats?

A little of each of those. There are some instrumental songs in the vein of ‘Tonto’ that I feel are a newer version of what we are – songs that are compositionally more challenging and fun. We also have some more vocally-driven songs, which is fun for us to venture into.

Was that where you brought the collaborators in?

Yeah, we collaborated with a couple of vocalists who we think are really excellent. With each person that we collaborated with, we had a song in mind that we thought they would add colour to. We worked with Matias Aguayo, he’s a DJ but he also does really cool stuff vocally – he added a level of sexyness to the song. Another person we collaborated with was Yamataka Eye from the Boredoms. We reached out to him, because we’re all fans. He gave us a lot of raw vocal tracks and gave us permission to edit them however we wanted.

Was it a markedly different process this time around?

It was a totally different way of working this time than it was with ‘Mirrored’. Last time we constructed a lot of songs just by jamming and playing in the live room. This time around it was different circumstances that made us experiment with different processes. There was a lot of space to work with in the studio, so we separated and spread ourselves out. The whole album was like a huge sculpture. We were just chipping away at the stone until we had our ‘David’!

It sounds like a vaguely artificial form of songwriting?

I think this was more of a fine-tuning procedure. Everything was under the microscope. We were way more analytical about it – it was a very intense process.

How would you sum it up?

To sum it up is really complicated, but I feel that there’s a spectrum here. There’s more flow to this album, more levels of intensity. There’s a lot of freedom that exists in this music. I don’t know where it came from because we were all working so hard – it was the antithesis of freedom – but I just feel like something really opened up during the process that the three of us found what we were looking for.

Bonus Factoids:

That last bit inspired a five minute conversation conducted entirely in U2 song titles.

Dave’s dog is called Valentino, after his Great Uncle.

The album features drummer John Stainer playing a frying pan.

We asked Dave to sum up the album in four words. He said “I feel… Oh shit”. We didn’t let him have another go.