When Saints Go Machine: “We wanted to push boundaries, personally and between ourselves.”

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Anticipation can be a dangerous thing. When expectations are raised, the possibility of falling short of them is perilous, and when the situation giving rise to this is a much loved band releasing a new record, anticipation can often be a band’s worst enemy.

There’s a key to combatting this pressure however, and that is to stick to your guns, to not pander to the expectations of those around you and to ensure that your band are following their own intuition and exploring their own ideas. Strong heads are needed, and in Copenhagen’s When Saints Go Machine, strong heads and strong ideas reign, meaning that their new album Infinity Pool has been well worth the wait. When we catch up with the band, they’re lounging in a grassy garden in Denmark’s Aarhus, having performed the very first show to feature their new material the previous night.

“It’s a lot of pressure off our shoulders, I guess. It was the first show with new material and with the new album coming up…” says vocalist Nikolaj Vonsild, settling onto the grass and reflecting on the previous evening’s festivities. “I’m glad it’s over, it went well but there’s a lot of stuff that you think about while playing, there are a lot of little details and it’s very much about intuition when you’re playing live.”

The unveiling of the new album took place at Denmark’s SPOT Festival, an inner city showcase event presenting bands from all over the Nordic regions to a new-music-hungry crowd. When Saints Go Machine were selected to headline the festival’s opening night, offering up a first glimpse of their revamped live show to a crowd of avid and eager listeners. With the newest sounds having now been aired and that nerve-wracking unveiling out of the way, the band are now able to focus their attention on the imminent release of their second full length album (or third, if you consider the non-UK released Ten Makes A Face). “We’re excited, we finished the album a month ago and we had a chance to dive into the material in another way. I think it might be less of a mainstream album than the last one… but I like it! I think it sounds like it was supposed to. And the next one will sound as it’s supposed to too,” says Nikolaj with a confident, wry smile.

Releasing the critically acclaimed Konkylie back in the spring of 2011, the band suddenly found themselves in a situation where a huge amount of attention was flooding in their direction, from mainstream press and fans through to listeners that they’d garnered in the time since the release of Ten Makes A Face. Having used what was clearly a winning recipe to create Konkylie, did the band decide to carry on in the same vein and stick to the same writing and recording process this time around? “It was kind of similar, but we went to my mother’s house in the forest to make Konkylie – and this time around, that didn’t work,” Nikolaj responds. “I guess everything was too chaotic, playing a lot of gigs, coming off of tour and then you had to figure out how to relax and get your mind around writing an album. So the feeling changed, we wanted to be harder. The process didn’t change a lot but the feeling of the music changed a lot. We didn’t try to make it organic, we weren’t inspired by nature this time around, we were more inspired by television and buildings and concrete.”

“When we made Konkylie, it felt like there was a kind of silence surrounding us,” he continues. “It was like a fairytale or something – I wasn’t living in the real world when we wrote that album! When we wrote Konkylie, my father’d passed away and six months or something passed, I got fired from my job and then six months after that, I thought ‘shit, I don’t have a job – let’s just try and live off music’ and it worked out. But this time around, it was more about it being strange being isolated in a city. It’s a natural thing to be isolated in a forest because you go there and there’s nothing around, but it’s weird being isolated in a city with so many people around you.”

Konkylie was released to unprecedented, but thoroughly deserved acclaim which saw the album chart at number two in the band’s native Denmark. An immaculate collection of rich, layered, electronically led and incredibly emotive tracks struck a chord with audiences far and wide, leading the album to be listed in ‘several Best of 2011’ lists and the band to be counted among the most important artists currently coming from Denmark. So second time around, was the album making process any easier? “I think you get in a state of mind where you’re writing these songs and if you’re making something shitty, you get down,” says synth player and vocalist Jonas Kenton, “and if you’re making something good, then you’re happy. It’s a state of mind where you’re really influenced by the work that you’re doing over a long period of time. So it can be really good and really bad.”

“It’s great because it’s something that you love, but at the same time it means so much to you that it’s fucking stressful work,” Nikolaj adds.

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Photo by Katie Anderson

The release of Infinity Pool was announced with the unveiling of what many would describe as an improbable collaboration. Atlanta rapper Killer Mike was enlisted to provide an overlay to the track ‘Love And Respect’, and to bring a whole new dimension to the quartet’s typically electronically led oeuvre. “Nikolaj met at a concert in Copenhagen,” explains Jonas of how the partnership came to take place. “We sent him the track – it wasn’t finished yet – and obviously he liked it and he wrote sixteen bars!”

“He’s a special guy,” adds Nikolaj, “talking to him… there’s something of an aura around him.” Was there any previous knowledge of the When Saints Go Machine catalogue from Killer Mike’s perspective? “No, not at all,” Nikolaj replies, “but I talked to him before, and I told him ‘we don’t really do rap music, we just want you on the track’. And he said yes, he didn’t care – it’s a banger!”

“I used to listen to a lot of rap music when the first Outkast album came in ’94,” Nikolaj continues. “I went to the record store for about two weeks and listened to it there because I didn’t have any money to buy it. And that sound was so special compared to anything else that came out around that time. So that was the first thing I ever heard from the South, then Goodie Mob came out and the whole Dungeon Family. So I’ve always been listening to Killer Mike, and his last album is just a really good rap album.”

This rap angle isn’t something that’s immediately apparent when considering the influences that When Saints Go Machine draw upon, although certain parallels can definitely be drawn. The quality of melodic tone that’s so vital to the WSGM sound, as well as the thoroughly considered and expertly crafted lyrics that embody their tracks are traits that are also intricately plotted when making rap tracks. “That was one of the reasons why we had the idea of getting in touch with Killer Mike, we thought ‘we need a rapper – that’s so crazy for a band like us!’” says Jonas. “We wanted to push boundaries, personally and between ourselves.”

“For me, it was quite a natural thing because I used to listen to a lot of rap music and now there’s a rapper in the album… so that’s a natural thing,” Nikolaj continues. “But people seem to have this understanding of what you’re doing and what you’re supposed to do, and we feel like every time we do something, it’s like pressing shuffle and something different comes up. We listen to every kind of music, Jonas and Silas also DJ a lot with Kenton Slash Demon, and I have this semi-acoustic band called Cancer and Simon did rap music with a rapper from Atlanta before we started the band.”

The addition of a rapper isn’t the only change in slant on this record. Compared to the band’s previous efforts, Infinity Pool is a much more stripped back affair. Rather than the intense layering and building of sounds, melodies and rhythms that were woven throughout their previous record, the band have been much more deliberate in creating a specific direction for each of their tracks and ensuring that every element present has room to be heard. “We decided that every song should have a signature sound,” explains Nikolaj of the thought process behind this latest collection of tracks. “On Konkylie there were a lot of layers that were fighting to be heard. But with this one, like with ‘Degeneration’, it’s about the bass – there’s almost no progression at all, just the bass. It could have been a rave track, but we thought ‘let’s not use drums’. And on ‘Infinity killer’, you’re being dragged through the song by my voice which is layered over and over again, and that’s supposed to be the signature sound. For the tracks with the drums, we wanted them to have a signature sound like the ones you find maybe on old rap albums or albums from the 70s, stuff that people would sample. So we needed a signature sound for every song.”

“I think that’s always been the case for us,” Jonas adds. “I think there are a lot of other bands where the whole album is very smooth, signature sound. In our band, the album’s going in many different directions. We want every track to sound special in some way, we’re not thinking ‘ok, now we have a single’ – every time we think of a song, it has to be special in some kind of way. And people that we meet have all kinds of different favourite tracks. People fall in love with different things, which is really cool.”

Some would argue that the critical acclaim received and the awards won by the group since the release of Konkylie should be considered among the most significant markers of this band’s career so far. But for When Saints Go Machine – clearly much more focussed on retaining their artistic integrity and making sure that each song that they create presents the exact tone and sentiment that the band intended – the most significant moments of their career to date are more personal. “I think the most significant thing is that we got a bit older and we’re better at communicating with each other now,” Nikolaj responds. “To me, that’s been really important. Even when we’re really stressed out, we don’t have to yell at each other, there’s an understanding there.”

“We’ve never been good at celebrating success or anything, it just feels like we’re continuing on the same path as we’ve always been on. But I think a lot of people were surprised by the success of Konkylie, at least in Denmark because that’s where we’re living, that’s where you meet people day to day and our music’s sometimes a little bit left-field for Denmark. So our label was a bit surprised – and you can always see people work a bit harder when it’s a success, and for us, that feels great because we’ve put a lot of hard work into it. So to see people enjoy it and to have a bit of success with it is great.”

Infinity Pool will be released through !K7 Records on 27 May.