Glaswegian noise-pop crew The Ninth Wave are one of the most hotly tipped acts around. Sewing together dreamy melodies with 80s new wave, the sound has always been there, but the expansion of sound displayed on Infancy Part 1 is their most accomplished yet.
The fuzzy, refined production carries along a menacing electronic bassline on the first track, ‘This Broken Design’, for example, and is a turn that elevates The Ninth Wave into welcome uncharted waters. The first part of a double debut album, Infancy Part 1 does not disappoint.
Here the band take us through their biggest release to date, track by track.
‘This Broken Design’
H: We’ve opened up all of our gigs in the last few months with this song and it’s the one that we decided to open up the album with too. It was the first song we’d written that was made up of (almost) completely electronic drums. We wanted to experiment with new sounds and take things in a different direction with the album, so we thought that this would be a fitting introduction. The 4 note loop at the start of the song was actually taken from the original demo of the song that I recorded at the start of 2018 in our studio in Glasgow.
I used an old Yamaha PSS-780 that I got for £50, but it was then layered with a Prophet 5 that we found in The Distillery (the studio that we made the album in), as well as a Siel Cruise that belonged to one of Dan’s friends.
The only live drums are made up of random pieces of tom and crash hits that were recorded and then transferred onto a TASCAM 4 track cassette recorder, and then taken back off and chopped up and made into patterns.
All of the songs were written around the same time and there’s a few key themes that run throughout the whole album, with this song itself being about trying to find comfort in faces I didn’t know, but not really managing to get away from that and having to deal with a constant reminder of a person I’d rather try and forget.
'Used To Be Yours’
Amelia: This was the last track that we wrote for the album and it was pieced together one afternoon in my bedroom. This song is a confession of my downfalls, but ones that I feel are unfortunately human to everybody. We all seem to have this fear of being alone, but I guess that’s our way of fighting for survival. The chords in this song were kept super simple which allowed for some really nice harmony building towards the end - I’ve always been a big fan of Marika Hackman and was very inspired by the atmosphere she creates through her close harmonies. When it came to recording the song, we felt that completely modular drums wouldn’t fit the rawness of the track, so instead we kicked a box of percussion instruments to create that crunchy off-beat sound.
‘Half Pure’
H: 'Half Pure' is probably the most outward-looking one of the whole bunch. It was written with vanity and narcissism in mind and how living in the society we do has affected us as people, sometimes turning us into two-faced, shallow and vain humans (“now you’ve misplaced your face, you’ll wear another one instead.”)
It actually started with a sample taken from an Alien Sex Fiend song that I’d made - I was determined to use it but it never made it from the demo to the final thing. However, the atmosphere it created for me while writing it helped the song become almost fully fleshed out in one evening. It was a really low synth drone that created this brooding and dark mood in the room. This song (as well as ‘This Broken Design’) features the bin that we used to use for live percussion at our shows. There’s actually no guitar on this recording either. It’s mostly made up of Amelia playing the root notes in different octaves on bass guitar, which went straight into the desk with the input level cranked. That signal was then totally abused - it was put through a Klon, an old EHX Micro Synth, a Pro-One and a Sovtek Big Muff.
‘All The Things We Do’
H: We wanted this song to be one of the heaviest on the album. We didn’t allow the guitars to have much reverb at all and we wanted a relentless electronic kick drum to run throughout the whole thing. There’s some industrial sounding modular noise as well, that originally came from a Moog DFAM before it was chopped up and made into a pattern. In saying that, throughout the middle 8 there’s some weird and ethereal sounding chords that were recorded on a warm sounding patch from a Juno 6.
The song is about how we’ve been conditioned to accept that relationships will fail. When things progress too fast and a relationship doesn’t have time to blossom, it can become a very damaging thing to be involved in. It’s about the frustration of knowing that the expected or “normal” way to act and go about human interactions in our modern world isn’t always the best.
‘A Wave Goodbye To The People Who Said I’d Win’
H: This song is the oldest one on the album. It had been floating around long before we started writing Infancy, but it didn’t fit anywhere else until the other songs started coming together. I think it’s the only one without a proper “chorus” - it just kind of appeared piece by piece once the offbeat bassline was written. I tried not to follow the typical song structure that I’m used to, so it was quite a refreshing song to put together. 'A Wave Goodbye…' kind of became the touchstone for the music we wanted to make going forward.
There’s a recurring theme of leaving people and feelings and things behind on this album and the task of trying to accept that. This song started the therapeutic process of writing about all of that and it was the first one to start dragging those thoughts out of my head and onto paper. The first verse is me telling myself to keep up appearances even when it feels like everything is falling apart. And then everything does actually fall apart, so the rest of the song is the questions and the desperation that comes after you’ve realised that there’s no coming back from that. I think that certain places can hold a memory and be a very vivid reminder of a situation or a feeling that you felt when you were last there. That’s what kind of spurred the initial idea on for this song.
‘First Encounters’
H: The lyrics in this song are a reflection on how much a person can change - I was looking back on the past year or so of my life and realised how much I’d changed as a person and how I felt like everything was coming to a climax, when all of the things you bottle up start to rear their head. Everything felt a bit fucked and I felt like I was able to interact with people normally, but after that first encounter with someone, then I didn’t really know what to do. I was scared that it was going to just become a part of who I was as a person. Everyone at some point in their lives feels the pressure and anxieties of existence, so I guess I was experiencing that around that time.
The Yamaha PSS-780 makes an appearance again, as it plays the intro and runs throughout the whole thing. It was used for a couple of the high synth parts as well. The built in vibrato and chorus on that synth is excellent, so we milked it as much as we could on this track. The TASCAM 4 track was used again and we did something that I’d wanted to do for a long time. We recorded an “ensemble” on all 4 tracks with different instruments, with all of them playing the same note. The pitch wheel was then used to change the note/chord, which allowed us to play the root notes of the song just by turning the pitch wheel to certain points. You can hear it in the instrumental break after the first chorus and then at various points throughout the song (you can hear it on its own at the very end too.)
We also lived out a very brief fantasy of being a metal band when we recorded guitar for this, as the main parts were done in drop C tuning. I know!!!
