WILD BEASTS

 On the heels of their critically-acclaimed breakout. Two Dancers, Wild Beasts are about to make an even bigger splash with Smother, a slinky, nocturnal paean to dreams, darkness an a feathers, touch soeaks to singer Hayden Thorpe about making a record in the digit age.

G'day Hayden. Can you tell ma little about how the word 'smother' informs the album?

I think that there was a sense of wanting to make something that was very comforting to us in this album. I think feathers were the key trigger point. Smother is a word with a double meaning; to smother someone with love is to cherish them But also to smother someone is to suffocate them, is to shroud them. We were really looking for that immersive quality.

There's a much more prominent electronic element to Smother, what attracted you to that sound?

Almost the crudeness of it. 11 the fact that we're not quite sure how to use those tools. We would throw things at software or the samplers and the sounds would deflect back at us in ways that we couldn't quite figure out. For me, when I pick up a guitar, I have a pretty good idea about what it's going to do. But for a while I felt empowered arid excited by software and what that could manipulate We thrive on the right to reinvent, and we were desperate to shed an old skin and create a Wild Beasts Version 3.0, as it were.

As a band that's been working primarily since the music industry's gone digital, how has the download affected the way you guys make music?

The key thing is we actually signed our contract and made our record literally six months before the global recession, and the global recession hit the music industry massively. This was sort of the sarne time that people fully went digital and thought, OK. what's one of fhe things I don't have to buy that I can save money on? Music. We were brought up to buy albums before the digital age. so you'd spend your money on an

ON HAYDEN'S IPOD

The Fiefd Yesterday and Today

I love how fragmented and abstract this album is. It's like there's a song there but it's almost like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, it's a bit distorted and refracted.

F'*k Buttons TarotSport

They're an incredible band. I think it's really something special,just their approach,their bravery. They're playing an ATP show in Japan at the end of the monfh which I'm absolutely thrilled about.

Caribou Swim

That record really had an impact on Smother, its use of electronica, but also its use of organic humanness.This sense of not quite knowing whaf sound is being made and who's making it, and where it's coming from. I think there's an enigmatic quality that's quite special.

album and you'd bloody-well listen to it to get your money's worth. We're not so concerned with that whole instant, disposable element of digital-age music.

Do you see iTunes overall as being a help or a hindrance to your music?

I think iTunes itself is an incredible facility. You hear a song and within minutes you can have the alburn. But it renders the mythology defunct. You can't slave over finding out what this song is, or slave over finding a record shop that stocks it. and you rnaybe don't cherish a record as much as you could. But I don't think its iTunes that's to blame. I think it's the wider culture of constant recycling and reprocessing, this constant need for something new. Rather than blame something else. I think we need to blame ourselves a bit .