Indie quintet Sad Boys Club have arrived and are ready to sweep people off of their feet with their recently released debut single ‘Know’. The newcomers began making music from a Bombay Bicycle Club shed.
We had the chance to talk to frontman Jacob about their sound, inspiration and what we can expect from the future for these guys.
You have mentioned The 1975 and The Cure as an inspiration for your sound. What other artists have influenced your indie-pop sound?
I’m not sure we think of it as an indie-pop thing, that’s not a tag I would ever want to put upon myself. Pedro (who I write a lot of the songs with) having grown up in Brazil, has a different vocabulary of taste to mine so we’re constantly learning about where one another’s ideas come from; we often clash over it. There are a lot of influences that find their way into what we make, too many to list, but we’re both into Pinegrove at the moment. And our friends Sorry.
How did the band start? How did you guys start playing together and decide this was going to be a full-time job?
I was in bands with Mac (Tom MacColl, drums) and Herz (Tom Herzberg, guitar) throughout school, in some ways I guess this is an extension of that. We’d taken a bit of a break from doing anything, during which I met Pedro when he engineered a session of another project I was working on. We were both a bit disillusioned with what we were up to but I was sitting on a bunch of band material that clicked with him, and we soon started getting excited by a couple of demos we were sending back and forth to one another. Jake and I had known each other for a few years from playing a similar circuit in earlier bands… somehow it all fell into place eventually. We aren’t yet doing it full-time. Important industry figures reading this, please contact our management and give us that decision to make.
You were neighbours with Jack Steadman, the frontman of Bombay Bicycle Club. Has he given you any useful band advice?
No, Jack never really spoke to us about anything, he just rode the same bus to school. That’s not to say he wasn’t supportive, he was, just not his vibe to be too forthcoming. Growing up watching Bombay develop was definitely informative of how we want to go about doing things, they’re definitely close to the heart of the kind of thing I would like to do with Sad Boys Club.
Tell us a bit about your inspiration behind your debut single ‘Know’ – you have described it as a ‘romantic apocalypse’, what inspired the lyrics and the sound?
I was going through a bit of a crisis at the time of its conception. Sonically, I was listening to lots of ambient, swung electronic loops by people like Emancipator and Blue Sky Black Death, I was a real loser at school. That’s not something that comes very naturally in composition to me so it ended up in its own sort of guitar-fuelled space. We tried to get a trapped sample quality on the instrumental of the record which plays off the subject matter a bit. The track is quite a visceral, direct description of what my mind was going through at the time, I don’t think it was too thought through to be honest.
What has been your thought process behind choosing ‘Know’ as your debut single? Will your future releases have a similar theme?
We wrote it a long while ago – it’s felt a bit like unfinished business and it’s also been the basis from which everything else has developed for the band, so it felt like a natural beginning.
What are your future projects after this debut single? Can we expect an EP coming in 2018?
We’ll see what happens – next up for us is another single towards the end of January, and hopefully a lot of live stuff.
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