“We're a blood and guts band, first and foremost”: Wild Beasts talk Present Tense

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“It’s a cobweb-clearing record, I think. A re-establishment of all the things we said we’d do at the start.”

Tom Fleming is currently operating at approximately five hundred miles an hour. He begins our conversation with a flurry of apologies, with his last interview having overrun. He’s ducked out of tour rehearsals just to do them in the first place, and speaks at a pace that had me seriously considering whether I should transcribe at half speed. It doesn’t strike me as a rush to blast through the afternoon’s promotional commitments, though; he talks about the new Wild Beasts record, Present Tense, with an enthusiasm that constantly threatens to brim over. He’s certainly of a different disposition to a year or so ago, when the band had just wrapped up touring for Smother.

“Burnout is probably too strong a word, but we were tired. It felt like we’d been on tour our whole lives, at that point. It was definitely time to pause, take a breath, and then do everything we could to make something we really, honestly cared about.”

Having firmly set up camp in the capital, the band were determined to try to take their time with album number four; that in itself, though, came with its own kind of pressure. “It became kind of a self-perpetuating process, partly because we wanted to make something worthwhile, and partly because we knew, as a result of that, that we wouldn’t have any excuses at the end of it. There was never going to be any hiding place, after taking all that time, if we didn’t end up with the record we’d wanted.”

The result is a delightful contradiction of an album; pretty much everything on Present Tense seems at once both grander and more intimate than the records that have gone before it. When I read, then, that the band themselves had been comparing it with their debut, Limbo, Panto, I was taken aback; this is unmistakably a Wild Beasts record, but sonically, there’s an obvious distance between the two.

“I think we meant that more in terms of attitude, really,” Fleming explains. “It’s a bit more confrontational, a bit more aggressive in its own way. I think we tapped back into the gang mentality we’d started out with, and the album’s kind of turned out as a worldview, as a result. I think every good record should be, actually. It should set out how you see things, and I think we’ve managed that.”

There’s certainly a reduced level of introspection. When compared to Smother or Two Dancers, there’s a palpable sense of the band looking outwards this time. “I don’t know about maturity, but there’s no avoiding the fact that we’re getting older. You start to let go of certain things. It becomes less about what you think you should be writing about, and more about what you think is important, what you think is interesting. For us, I think that’s the outside world. We wanted to be less wordy, too, and more direct; we came to realise that elaboration maybe isn’t as powerful as we thought it was.”

An in-depth interview that singer Hayden Thorpe gave to New Statesman last year hinted at a complicated relationship with politics within the band, and clear reference to the class system on recent single “Wanderlust” seems to confirm it. It’s reasonably risky thematic territory to be entering into if you want to avoid being pigeonholed – or dismissed as some modern-day Billy Bragg – but it’s also an inevitable symptom, Fleming insists, of taking a broader lyrical approach.

“Politics touch every aspect of your life, I think. It’s an overstatement, though; I don’t think we’ve really pursued those themes on the album. It’s more that there’s an awareness of context, an awareness of what things are like out there. You ask yourself if you like the world around you, and for us, the answer was no. There’s definitely some distaste about the world that seeps through, but it’s probably always been there; it’s just that it’s more explicit this time.”

The other thing that’s striking about “Wanderlust” is a penchant for crunching synths, and it’s a fair reflection on the rest of the record; there’s plenty of guitar in there, but it’s more for punctuation this time, with electronics forming the bulk of the instrumental palette. “A lot of that was practicality, too,” Fleming points out, “because we’re London-based these days; there’s not a of space, and we couldn’t really make a lot of noise. It kind of became a necessity to use a computer to write, and from that, we realised that there’s this whole world of sound at your fingertips. Guitars are very much a feature of the record, still, but they’re much more interwoven. There’s a real intricacy, I think, and that’s one of the things about being in a band that I love; the way all the little parts fit together.”

“That’s something we had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out, when we started thinking about how it was going to work on stage. If anything, it’s a smaller sound. We’re back to just a four-piece now,” – Katie Harkin, who joined them on the road last time out, has returned to her Sky Larkin day job – “and everything’s more concise. And I like that.”

As far as the move to the capital’s concerned, though, there were far bigger considerations than a lack of soundproofing for a band that can probably lay fair claim to being the biggest thing to come out of Kendal since mint cake. “There’s certainly a sense of guilt, given what London’s come to represent. There is that feeling that you’ve abandoned the north. But that becomes a bit self-defeating, you know? I mean, that’s actually one of the worst things about the north of England. That old “fuck you, we’re the north!” attitude.

“We come from a very small town, and we were definitely always comfortable with the idea that we were going to have to leave, and uproot,” he continues. “You end up in this very interesting place; you’re on the road, and you’re kind of stateless, you’re between places all the time. I didn’t get on a plane until I was eighteen years old, and now I’ve been all over the world, and I feel like it’s your responsibility to do something like that and try to do away with that sense of parochialism. Don’t get me wrong, London’s parochial too, but you can’t stay still forever.”

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The bulk of Present Tense was tracked out in Bath, making it the latest stop on the Wild Beasts recording tour, with Norfolk, Snowdonia and Malmo being past destinations. As Fleming elaborates, “whenever you make something, somewhere, there’s always going to be a ghost of it left behind. It’s better to keep moving.” It still has the band’s signature sound running through it, though; it’s so signature, in fact, that you wonder whether they actually take any cues from their contemporaries.

“Our influences have become pretty electronic, actually.” He pauses. “Well, not just electronic. God, that was such a dickhead, hipster thing to say, wasn’t it?” I know what he means, though. “There’s a lot of producers we listen to; we’re into that spacious sort of stuff that Clams Casino does. All that Triangle stuff, actually; Evian Christ and The Haxan Cloak, too. And then there’s that stuff that just has a constant sense of adventure – Oneohtrix Point Never, and Tim Hecker.”

“We’re into less experimental things as well, obviously. You know, those solid American rock bands – The Antlers, and The National. It’s important to keep your channels open, and not steal, but – well, you can steal, but you have to make it obvious you’re stealing. Don’t take everything, and don’t pretend it’s yours. It’s a very elegant thing to do, I reckon, stealing. “Bad art imitates, great art steals”. That’s Warhol, right?” Wrong, actually; Google’s since told me it’s Picasso, but that, of course, is besides the point. It’s the honesty that’s refreshing, even if it’s from a band with so few obvious points of comparison.

The rule of thumb – “well, it’s not a rule, but it’s loosely true” – is that Fleming writes the lyrics that he sings, and Thorpe does likewise. I suggest that on Present Tense, the former’s contributions seem darker than the latter’s, even though the overall feel of the record is more upbeat than its predecessors. “You’re probably right. I can definitely be a morose so-and-so. It is an optimistic record, and I’m glad you’ve said that, but I feel like I tend to be pretty forthright.”

“You’ve got to deal with the facts, you know? Things are essentially meaningless, and you are going to die, and everyone you know is going to go through some shit, and that’s fine, but I think it’s important not to flinch from that and say, “hey guys, it’s all good! Everything’s OK!” while Rome burns behind you. You need to have those gears to move through. I know how depressing that makes me sound,” he laughs, “but, in the very basic sense, that’s what I find interesting.”

That balance is particularly obvious on “New Life”. It’s the penultimate track on the album, and there’s a resemblance, sonically, to its Smother counterpart, “Burning” – it moves quietly, cautiously, with tentative synths buzzing in the background. Where it differs, though, is in its lyrical content; there’s a cautious positivity, as Fleming spins an abstract tale of fragile new beginnings – “world cleave open, the line is fine / open its eyes like new life.”

“I think that juxtaposition is crucial for us,” he says. “I like being able to play around with things like that. I think that’s one of the great beauties about music, actually. Being able to take things apart, and then put them back together wrong.”

Although the lyrical workload is split between Fleming and Thorpe, there’s an eloquence that underscores the contributions of both; that articulate, deeply expressive turn of phrase that they both display such a mastery of is probably the band’s defining characteristic.

“It’s a response to the sort of meat and potatoes bands we grew up around, I guess. You know what I’m talking about – ‘proper lads, proper haircuts’, those kinds of bands. They don’t feature as much these days, thankfully. But, you know, think about it: how many people have written lyrics in the past? You’ve got to do something to try to stand out; it’s obviously difficult to write something interesting.”

“It’s up to you to decide if it’s interesting, obviously, but I’d hate people to think it was a pose, or some kind of intellectual game we’re playing with the listener. I do think we’re a blood and guts band, first and foremost. Everything we do comes from the heart and the gut first, and the brain second.”

Present Tense is available February 24th via Domino. Wild Beasts tour the UK in March and April – head here for details and tickets.