Villainy
/By Ben Doy
By Ben Doy
Last month Villainy released their highly anticipated sophomore album 'Dead Sight'; the follow up to their impressive 2012 debut release 'Mode. Set. Clear'. Consisting of James Dylan, Neill Fraser, Dave Johnston and Thom Watts, I had a quick chat with Neil and find out some more about the new album and what the band have been up too.
How long were you guys working on Dead Sight for?
We started tracking last April. We flew to Melbourne and did about six weeks up there and cut kind of half the record then. When we came home we wrote sort of like 20 or so songs and then went back and did another six week stint to get the other half of the record done. So it was sort of in two pieces but we wanted as much material as possible.
And you recorded it again with Shihad's Tom Larkin!
Yeah! He's got a studio in north Melbourne in Brunswick, which is a cool suburb... I guess a bit kind of K' Roadie from about 10 years ago. The studio is in the back of an old mechanics warehouse type thing. It's a cool big single room and we had the drums set up in there, and we're all in there every day jamming through songs, producing them, and then we do the live take with all of us in there together.
How did recording the album differ from your debut album 'Mode. Set. Clear.'?
The first record we kind of took the high production approach to it... we tracked everything separately, we did the drums at Neil Finn's Roundhead Studios. We kind of went to Melbourne separately, did our parts and then came back. Other than songwriting it was kind of a detached process, we weren't really together for much of the recording at all. So this time around we really wanted to be a band in a studio; it made sense to do it that way rather than a piece meal approach. The sound of the band playing live in the room, it's just more real. We wanted to capture that really organic live energy, that was a big goal for us.
What's Villainy been up too between albums?
Quite a lot! The first record came out in October 2012, so I think in that time we'd done 3 or 4 New Zealand tours We went across to Australia for a couple of short runs, played things like Big Day Out, did some big supports at Vector for The Offspring, Homegrown... yeah, it was mainly on the road. A lot of the songs we started with on this record were written in that period between tours.
What are your plans for Summer and heading onto 2016?
Not sure yet what our plans for Summer are yet. We'd like to go out again if the right kind of opportunity arises. Later this year we're going to head over to Australia and try to get the album released up there. So we'll do some shows to support that. And around that time we'll look at doing our own headline tour as well. Just ram the record home and get it too as many people as possible.