Pulled Apart by Horses: "We were ready to venture into the garden of harmony"

Two years ago, Pulled Apart by Horses released their second full-length, Tough Love. It was a little more polished, a little more nuanced, than their decidedly gung-ho - but fucking brilliant - self-titled debut, and had secured them critical acclaim as well as a burgeoning fanbase. Accordingly, they’d done the reasonable thing and booked themselves their biggest UK tour to date, which was set to take in rooms as big as Manchester’s 1500-capacity Ritz, as well as the Forum in London. A few weeks ahead of time, though, they cancelled, with little in the way of explanation.

“It was a really tough decision to make,” guitarist James Brown tells me down the phone from the band’s native Leeds. “Everything was in a state of flux, really; we were changing labels, and we just thought - do we carry on the campaign for this record, or do we actually spend some time trying to write properly for the next record? If we’d stayed on the road, we’d have been back to square one once we got off of it, needing to turn another record around with only a few months to write and record it. We wanted to avoid that pressure, really.”

The result is Blood, an album which represents a startling achievement - if only because it’s married the sensibility of the band’s past records to a new, experimental bent in gloriously effective fashion. On their first album, they seemed to get by on little more than some furious riffs and irreverent lyricism; now, suddenly, this iteration of Pulled Apart by Horses is altogether more considered and more intelligent - and that’s still not to say that they’ve shed any of their legendary penchant for dicking about.

“We needed more time, purely because previously, we’d be thrown into a studio with a producer and given eight, ten, twelve days to finish the album,” says Brown. “That’s fine if you’re trying to make something like that, and we did with the first album; we wanted to make a record that was really fast, and heavy, and full of proper punk energy. This time, though, we wanted to experiment with dynamics and sounds and that kind of thing, so we recorded over the course of three two-week sessions. I think the main pitfall we were trying to avoid was putting down a load of demos and then just basically not doing any more than just putting a bit of polish on them in the studio. We needed a different ethic this time, really.”

It’s probably a sign of the group’s increasing maturity that they chose the more financially-viable option when it came to choosing a location for the making of Blood, even if it wasn’t necessarily the most glamorous setting on the table. “That was really a key decision, because we could have gone to somewhere like New York, Los Angeles or Seattle,” admits Brown. “We could have gone somewhere like that with enough of a budget to be able to record for maybe two weeks, and it would’ve been a fantastic opportunity to step out of our comfort zone. The other option, though, was to do it in England, and make the money last us for a good couple of months. We went for that in the end; we recorded in Leeds and spent the money that might have gone on a fancy studio in LA just taking our time, experimenting, and coming up with genuinely new ideas. It meant we could stay at home, as well, and pop out and do the odd show, without worrying about using every expensive second of studio time that we’d paid up front for.”

I have to press Brown, at this point, on precisely what he means by experimentation; he keeps talking about it in relatively vague terms, but to scrap a tour of the magnitude of that aborted 2012 jaunt must have meant that the band had some serious plans in mind for the studio. “I think the main thing was the vocals. I don’t want to say that we wanted to shy away from screaming, but we did realise that what Tom (Hudson, frontman) did had the potential to add a new dimension to what people think about when they think about Pulled Apart by Horses. I mean, there is some all-out, hellfire screaming on the record, but we were definitely ready to venture down that pathway into the garden of harmony too, you know? There’s a lot of melodic stuff on there, for sure. Back on the first record, we’d lay down the instruments, and then Tom would just disappear into another room with a bottle of whisky and record the vocals in one take. We’ve all got some form of ADHD, and we all needed to move away from that old way of doing things. It’s always nice when you hear a genuine evolution in a band, rather than just making a fifth record that sounds just like the first, second, third and fourth, like the fucking Stereophonics.”

That approach came with an obvious risk, though; the band’s incendiary live shows have always been at the very core of their appeal, both to the hardcore and the casual, and you therefore have to wonder if pursuing a more considered sound might have an adverse effect on their very bread and butter. “That is a very good point,” says Brown, after a long pause. “I do think about that. But, you know, I’ve come to notice that, whether you’re playing a three-minute, lightning-fast machine-gun riff kind of thing or something that’s slower, and more deliberate, you’ve still got to learn it from the ground up anyway, if it’s a new song. It’s always totally bewildering at first, just because it’s new; it doesn’t matter whether it’s another ‘High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive’, or something totally different. That’s why we did a long warm-up tour back in March, just to be able to get our heads around this material in a little club somewhere; it’s one thing to play them, and another to perform them, if you know what I mean. We’re never going to stand there like telephone poles with our guitars up to our necks. I don’t think any of these new songs have lessened the gigs; it’s just that, with each track, you have to figure out how to climb a fifty-foot festival rig and still be able to play a picked-out arpeggio with one hand.”

If there’s any profound change in the Pulled Apart by Horses philosophy on Blood, then, it’s the new direction with the guitars; suddenly, the huge riff doesn’t quite seem like a staple any more, and with Brown as lead guitarist, that’s something that’s primarily down to him. “When we had time off to write, I was listening to a lot of The Flaming Lips, and a lot of Sonic Youth. I was thinking about the sound of the guitars, rather than what was actually being played, and perhaps that’s why we’ve moved away from those one-note riffs, you know? There’s less of that Rage Against the Machine-style pure riffery, just because I needed to challenge myself a little bit. It’s so easy to turn up to a practice and go, “check this riff out, lads! Dern dern, dern dern dern, dern, dern dern da!”, and just be met by the same old blank faces going, “yeah, we’ve heard it all before, James.” I’m a big, big Radiohead fan as well, so I just wanted to try different angles, and fuck about with scales and solos and that kind of thing.”

That actually leads us to another of the band’s defining characteristic; the sheer irreverence of their approach is something that’s made blatant through both their song titles - try "I Punched a Lion in the Throat", "I’ve Got Guestlist to Rory O’Hara’s Suicide" and "Bromance Ain’t Dead" on for size - and their lyrics; on their first record, they ran the gamut from referencing The Legend of Zelda ("The Crapsons") to glorifying the frankly indecently-large bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman on "Yeah Buddy". Quite where some of these ideas come from, then, was something I’d long been wanting to ask about.

“I’ve started referring to it as a disgusting habit, these days,” laughs Brown. “We’ll all write together in our rehearsal room, and when we come up with a new song, someone’ll just say, “...‘Lizard Baby’?” And then, you know, “yeah, go on then.” Eight months later, we’ll get around to recording it, and those titles will just have stuck. That’ll be how we know those songs; just daft nicknames that stick. It’s not until you send it off to management, and to the label, that you realise what you’ve done; you’ll have that exasperated voice going on at you down the phone. “Oh, what the fuck are you doing? You’ve got this great song, it’s really catchy, and you’re calling it fucking ‘Lizard Baby’?””

Lyrically, too, there’s a sense of genuine transition on Blood; on their debut, only "Moonlit Talons" seems to be free of subject matter that clearly seems to be tongue-in-cheek, but this time around, there’s a touch more darkness - more awareness - to the album’s themes. “It’s generally Tom who writes the lyrics; him and Rob (Lee, bass) take care of that between them, really. They’ve always done all of our artwork, so they’ve got a really keen sense of our visual aesthetic; it makes sense for them to come up with the words, too. Tom has this Notepad file on his phone, and he’s constantly just noting weird words down in it; there’s some of the most bizarre stuff I’ve ever heard on there, but it must make some kind of fucked up sense to him. We’re all aware of the meaning of the album, and the title, and so on; it does seem a bit clearer on a broader scale, once you take a step back and look at it, but once you’re in the middle of recording any one particular song, it really is anyone’s game as to what the fuck’s going on."

It’s now, of course, de rigeur for bands to launch their own booze alongside their new album; in my native Manchester, the legendarily-sozzled Elbow already have two ales to their name, and just a couple of months back, Jenny Lewis went about things in considerably classier fashion by pairing The Voyager with a specially-fermented red wine. Pulled Apart by Horses have joined those ranks with Blood; a beer by Revolutions Brewing Co. shares the record’s name. “Oh, that was fucking weird! They’re a local Yorkshire brewery, from Tadcaster, and we weren’t sure at first; we didn’t know if it suited us, I suppose. Once we had a bit more of a concept for the record, with it being called Blood, we went back and said yes, and then the next thing we knew, me and Tom were at the brewery wading around in vats of malt and helping to make the first batch. It went down a treat at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, or so I’m told; they had the first few casks on up there. Very weird, but pretty cool, too.”

The band will finally have the chance to atone for their cancellation of two years ago in November, with a slew of UK dates lined up; Brown already has one eye on the next record, but concedes that the opportunity to tour more widely than ever before will likely prove difficult to resist. “We’re going to be able to go to a lot of places we’ve never been to before, with the record getting a worldwide release. The next four to six months are going to be pretty intense - we’ll just constantly be on the road - and then, after that, I can already see what’s going to happen; we’ll get to March, we’ll do another UK tour, then some more European dates, and before you know it - festival season. We’ll probably have to start writing new songs in soundcheck. That’s fine - it doesn’t take us too long to write - but, like I said, I think we all want to avoid it being a case of me getting my guitar out and being like, “lads! Are we having this or what? Dern-dern-dern, dern-da-dern-dern-dern...”

Blood is available now via Sony RED. Pulled Apart by Horses play six UK shows in November.