Off the Record

Evie 0:00
This is Evie with WKNC Talking to isa from slow crush.

Isa 0:14
So I'm Isa from slow crush. Me To start off, slow crush is heavy shoe gaze and from based in Belgium.

Isa 0:27
Yeah, we've been playing music together for quite a long time from various musical backgrounds, mainly from harder genres. So this is the first time we've done something a little bit softer, a little bit more really. Actually, the idea was that we wanted to try something different. So we wanted to maybe go a little bit more on the indie route, and then the sort of heavy shoe gaze style lended well to our style of playing in general. So that's the bucket that we've been generally put in. But I think a lot of listeners can hear all of the different elements coming from everything else that we've ever played before. So there's a lot of hardcore and a bit heavier pounding rhythms that you can hear in our in our sound, and then some some metal influences going in there, then with the dreamy vocals over that and all of the effects, that's what kind of ties it all together and lends the shoegaze name you

Isa 1:46
the shoegaze is very niche in Belgium, so there's not a lot of bands that play out here. And we've always seen from the beginning that our fans are mainly based in the US or the UK. So yeah, UK being kind of the instigators of shoegaze, with with My Bloody Valentine and slow dive. And I think in the US, it's just kind of, it's just sort of skyrocketed, like

Isa 2:18
definitely coming across the US, everybody is so much more open and open to showing their emotions and feelings, and so we get a lot of like, it's great to see the crowd dancing, having multiple sort of ideas coming from multiple people. It's definitely something that builds your story. We we tend to write our songs, starting off with one idea, and then building from there. So we build like layer upon layer upon layer like the story has different chapters. We're putting, putting all of the pieces together by adding each layer of guitar over guitar over guitar. So our stories, our books, can be pretty heavy. Sometimes. There was one song that we recorded in the studio, and we looked back at the tracks, and I think there were over 200 guitar tracks alone on that one song.

Isa 3:29
So a lot of chapters to that story. But yeah, I think the we do tend to have a flow that does create a nice sort of story thread. And I think that's definitely, that's definitely, you can hear that on the album as well, as I mentioned, we sort of go from from sort of something very uplifting. I heard somebody actually describe it as instead of the calm before the storm, it's like The people like the solemnity before an impending nightmare. I

Isa 4:24
with any slow crush song, I feel that we always try to mix the light and the dark in general. So we've always got that balance some songs, one, one side weighs heavier than others, but we always have like the the hopefulness that can be heard in there. So I think that is the key to every slow crash story

Isa 4:52
where we all kind of grew up listening to sort of 90 the 90s style music. So that was the idea. Year of starting the band, I think the shoe gaze, part of it just sort of fell into place when, when I realized that that was the best vocal timbre for me. So we just came off the back of very do me metal bands and and singer had left, and then we just floated the idea of me singing in that band, but I just can't scream or Grunt, so that just didn't work. And then, and then, yeah, we were listening to a lot of more European bands, like mum runner and Jaguar from Germany, and that style of vocals was easy for me to sing. So we just tried something like that out. I think we started off with a cover of pity sex, I think, and, and that worked really well. So we thought, okay, well, well, this fits the idea that we wanted to go in anyway. So, yeah, that style of writing also came naturally to us. Speaks David Lynch, she's a little she goes before as well. And I think if you the final season of Twin Peaks, where they had like a band play at the end of every episode, I think it was, yeah, I think that the first episode was with the chromatics. So that was very, very, very much you gave me. But I think, I think this genre lends well to anything, David Lynch

Isa 6:40
and and essentially everything's sort of everything has spawned off from blues, right? So yeah, blues influenced rock and roll, and then that just sort of diversed into various forms of pop music or then rebellious things like punk. So everything comes from blues eventually, whether there's a particular, particular Belgian, I think Belgium has always sort of been looking at the at the States and the UK for styles of music that it's that it's created. I mean, yeah, you had the old sort of kind of crooners back in the day. But then I suppose that they were also influenced by Yeah. I guess Tom Tom Jones isn't probably as old, but things like yeah from the UK, similar, like Max by grace, perhaps. So I think Belgium has always been looking across the water for For Inspiration. But I might be completely wrong. Being British myself, I might not know the entire history of Belgian Belgium music, but maybe one thing to tie it in. So, you know, the saxophone was created in Belgium, and we do have a little saxophone part on our new record. So there we go. Belgium represent a little bit of a brighter theme in terms of the artwork. We're still sort of, I don't know if you've noticed, but all of our album covers have had a similar theme being in that there's, there's a person on the cover, but they're never fully in view, so the face is always obstructed. So that is the theme that's kind of gone through the albums, but this time with a different color palette. Yeah, we felt that the the color maybe matched the music a little bit more the album itself. We We thought long and hard about the flow of the of the tracks, and we really like the way that we put it together, where we've sort of created a yin yang, side A, Side B, a little bit like melancholy and the infinite sadness. So the side a is a little bit more up tempo and uplifting, and then side b is the dark side sort of thing. And that's kind of represented in the album cover as well, where you've got the yellow, the bright brightness on the left and then gradually going into the darker right side of the cover.

Isa 9:34
But yeah, we spent a long time writing the album. Well, we spent a long time touring off the previous album, because we really wanted to get that out there everywhere, and play as much as we could. So it took us a while before we could really sort of sit down and focus on finessing the tracks, getting them ready for for recording, which we finally managed to manage to do late last year. So we went back to. The Ranch production house, which is in the UK, where we recorded Aurora as well. We've recorded a couple of sessions there before. Well, recording them, we kind of went in there with with the idea to try something new in the studio. So that was back at the ranch as well. And, yeah, we just recorded them as essentially, like demo recordings, but then we wanted to bring that out, so we brought it out as a single. I think you just learned so much if you've, if you've played so many shows, toured so much, and been in contact with lots of different musicians, you see, like, everybody sort of checks out each other's pedal boards, and then you see what's on stage. And you think, Ah, maybe that would work for what we're trying to to get at. So, yeah, it's just always a case where you pick up things as you go along. And I like even on my desk right now, there are just so many pedals that we have used in the past but may no longer use. So the countless numbers of times we've changed our complete backline, and even now, we're trying out a new in ear monitoring system. So yeah, as I said, every show, there's something new that we learn about and and want to try out. So being able to connect, because we do find that we bring a lot of different people together. Well, music does in general, I think that music is kind of a universal, a universal way to be able to enjoy something together, no matter what culture you cultural background you come from, if you see how many listeners come from completely opposite sides of the world who have no connection at all, but then music, their music interests can can be that that way to bring those people together, then it's, it's just a beautiful thing

Isa 12:18
that will just be after our album release. So we will have our new records with us. Album comes out at the end of August, the 28th August, I believe. So we'll have some fresh off the press and ready to share with you all.

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