This post was originally published on this site
Recorded almost live in an old church hall in Bristol, The Grand Scheme Of Things, the second album from SUGAR HORSE was released in October last year and provides a perfect soundtrack for the dark Winter months, combining as it does a powerful mix of soaring post-rock synths and guitars, mournful vocals and drone-fuelled doom. It’s both empowered and vulnerable and a real highlight in a bumper 2024 of heavy British music.
The album is thick with atmosphere and emotion, which comes as no surprise when you learn it was largely written following the passing of frontman Ash Tubb’s father. We sat down with Ash to talk about how he tackled the process of creating music at such a difficult time.
“Since the first lockdown in 2020, I’ve tried to be really disciplined with myself and write something every single day, even if that’s just a verse or a chorus or something,” begins Ash. “Most of it’s terrible to be honest but I treat it like a woodchipping exercise really. The more you build up, the more you have to piece together to make into cool things. But it’s usually just what I call cowboy chords and vocal melodies that I start off with and I already had a massive bank of that before I even really started properly writing the record.”
It was during the most recent of these experimental writing periods that tragedy struck, however, and Ash found out about his father’s cancer diagnosis. “I’d done all of that before I found out about the state of my dad’s health and how far gone he was. He was a super private man really, so he didn’t even tell me until he was actually in palliative care and obviously that really came as a shock but as a result of that the album really started to take shape. I mean, I had a theme now, whether I liked it or not.”
It’s clearly a difficult subject to talk about but rather than stop everything and wallow, Ash used it as a catalyst to focus more on his writing in an attempt to work it all through in his head. It wasn’t though, as some might expect, an entirely solitary process, as he goes on to explain. “Although I’ll write those cowboy chords, the lyrics and have some sort of idea of what I want the finished song to sound like, I’ll bring that initial idea into the rest of the band and then we’ll play around with it and it’s always a non-precious process. If there’s a part that everything thinks sounds rubbish when I bring it to them then it just gets deleted and someone else will come up with something to replace it instead.”
The album was actually written across the entire span of his father’s death, starting before Ash knew he was ill and finishing after his passing. It’s almost possible to trace this journey throughout the songs on the album which seem to follow the different stages of grief in terms of the emotions they deal with and the atmosphere they create. The sequencing of the album in this way was very much a conscious decision, as Ash explains. “It’s weird because I actually had the title The Grand Scheme Of Things in my head for a long time, largely due to it being one of those things my dad would just start every sentence with. I always like to have a title first, just to have a bit of a springboard for the ideas that follow, especially for a band like us that can go in a lot of different directions! I was really inspired by MOGWAI who became known for starting their songs very quietly and then in a split-second switch to deafeningly loud, without any kind of pause. Their second album actually does that almost across the whole album, where the first songs are quite calm and chilled and by the last song they’re just going completely nuts. I thought it would be really fun to try something similar and mess with people’s heads a bit.”
While it has its (incredibly) heavy moments though, Ash was wary of SUGAR HORSE just being seen as a metal band. “I wanted to have a first half that’s not actually metal in any way and then immediately follow those first few songs with something that’s unexpectedly, crazily heavy and then have that carry on a bit more into the second half. And that did fit in well with the structural theme that’s in there. Sometimes you do just have to let the chips fall and arrange them afterwards but there’s a couple of songs where I was writing them and planning on how they would fit into the record overall to create the right feeling that I was looking for. It was very much a ‘whole record’ thing, rather than just knocking out individual songs and hoping they worked together.”
As well as MOGWAI as a major influence, THE CURE clearly also features heavily on Ash’s playlists. “Yes! I basically just wanted to write a song that could’ve been written by Robert Smith! But also with a song like Spit Beach, we also tried to write the heaviest, nastiest thing we could and I think both of those kinds of songs actually sit really well on the same album.” Given the theme of the songs, the transition from mournful CURE-like anthems to furiously crushing doom brilliantly encapsulates the feelings of sorrow, helplessness and anger that come with the loss of a loved one. One song in particular that has caught the attention of fans and reviewers alike is Space Tourist, the final track on the record and one that ends with seventeen minutes of looped, droning guitars and synths. “Yeah, that was deliberate too! And while it may also link to the overall theme of the album, it was something that we just thought would be a really cool way of ending it all. Like, there’s nowhere else to go really when you have an incredibly loud and endless chord stuck on the end!”
The Grand Scheme Of Things is out now via Pelagic Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS116 here:
For more information on SUGAR HORSE like their official page on Facebook.
The post Sugar Horse: Riding Into The Darkness appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.
