Sundara Karma’s ethereal vocalist and guitarist Oscar Pollock is sitting in a coffee shop in Peckham digesting the reaction to the band’s second studio album Ulfilas’ Alphabet. “It’s been really positive I think, there’s been a lot of love for it. It’s mainly been love. There’s been some people who have disliked it, but I kind of like that as well, I almost love it when people hate it [laughs] so I think it’s a nice place to be. I like that it’s given us some new fans and it’s also maybe turned some people off, but you’ve got to do that with each record otherwise you’re just playing it too safe.”
The album was recorded during summer last year at RAK studios in West London and it was here that the band recruited Kaines (also known as Alex Robertshaw, of Everything Everything) on production duties, as they paved a different sonic path. “Alex brought his Eurorack, which is full of different modular synthesisers and I think that bought a whole different element to it. We put everything from drums and guitars through it so that was a new thing we didn’t have on the first record, and then just more synths in general,” explains Oscar, when comparing the recording process to that of their affirming debut Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect.
Their aforementioned debut, a rip-roaring journey through youth - and all of the ups and downs that come with it - was a mighty success, but any Sundara fan who may have suspected they would replicate the sound of the debut would be sorely mistaken. Instead the quartet decided to rip up the rule book and rewrite their own. A myriad of prolific and decadent synths create the underlying tone of a record that ultimately oozes with experimental diversity. An acoustic guitar engulfs ‘A Song For My Future Self’, ’Higher States’ sees the band dip their toe into the rave, whilst the meandering bassline on ‘Rainbow Body’ is one of the album’s exquisite highlights. “I tend to not think about what I’m writing for when I write; I can write a folk song and then next it could be dubstep [laughs] but I think it’s good to not judge those things. When I start writing with specific projects in mind it’s awful. Recording-wise, the demos are usually pretty fleshed out so there’s enough balance in those to know this is where the song needs to go,” Oscar explains.
And with a record overspilling with such diversity, one can only imagine the time it takes to order the tracklist. “Everybody had something to say, and everyone had their own opinion: I remember there was one late night in the studio when we were listening back to everything and we were like ‘Rainbow Body’ is going to start the album and then it’s going to be ‘Illusions’. We were so convinced that was going to be it then it kept totally changing. Peter our manager really helped us to find the tracklisting; he was really good at helping us do that.”
Ulfilas’ Alphabet has also allowed Oscar to extend his creative endeavours, assuming responsibility for all of the accompanying music videos for the record. “I’m so happy that I’ve been able to do them, it’s something I’ve always really wanted to do and over the past three years I’ve been getting more and more obsessed with film and I find it a really fascinating world. I love to merge film and music in all of the stuff we do, that’s why it’s nice to do music videos to have a bridge into that world, but yeah I’m still cutting my teeth, it’s so much fun, I’m really enjoying it.”
The DIY visuals for ‘One Last Night On This Earth’ have transpired to be the singer’s favourite so far, and Oscar is finding it easy to translate the images in his head onto film. "I’m an overthinker, massively: with anything I have ever created I’ll pick holes in it. When I’m in the moment making these music videos it’s been pretty spot on with it looking how I want it to, but of course once they’re out and you seem them a few more times there’s always things you wish you had changed.”
Thoughts have now turned to the live shows in support of the record, and from what Oscar tells us, it’s set to be quite a spectacle. “The live show, aesthetically, looks incredible: I’ve been working with a guy called Rob Sinclair who did the recent David Byrne show and he’s done Kylie Minogue shows in the past too, he’s super talented and fun to work with. We’ve also got Jeffrey Bryant doing the outfits, he’s done stuff with the Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran and Lady Gaga.” The live set up is even bigger now too with keyboardist Elina joining the tour, as Oscar details, “I think having her there really helps glue the old stuff and the new stuff together much more so than if she wasn’t there, and a lot of the new songs we literally wouldn’t be able to play live without her.”
As our chat wraps up, I wonder if Oscar’s approach to making music is changing as the musician gets older? “Yeah I really think it is and I always hope it does,” he begins. “It’s a good quality and a bad quality to have but I like to bounce around quite a bit and I get bored of one thing if I’m doing it for too long. I think I need to be more disciplined and stay with one thing. When I was writing this album I was going here and there, it would be nice to try something more focused but I don’t know if I could literally do that style.” Whether a more focused approach will also work, time can only tell, and as Oscar admits, “I’m not thinking about this album at all at the moment, apart from doing interviews and playing it live, I have mentally moved on from it,” we could be finding out much sooner than we think.
Sundara Karma play London’s O2 Academy Brixton tomorrow (13 April) and will also be playing Reading and Leeds this summer (23-25 August).
