More about: The Academic

It's been almost exactly five years to date since Irish indie-rockers The Academic released their award-winning debut album Tales From The Backseat in 2018. The band’s relentless work ethic has seen them earn a number one in the official Irish album charts, as well as supporting the likes of Noel Gallagher and The Rolling Stones, in addition to playing to 50,000 at Electric Picnic Festival last year in their native Ireland. But now The Academic are set to embark on an exciting new chapter with the release of their sophomore album Sitting Pretty - arriving 10th February via Capitol Records. 

Produced under the wing of former Kaiser Chiefs member, Nick Hodgson, Sitting Pretty is an entrance into true adulthood. Now in their late twenties, Craig Fitzgerald, Dean Gavin and brothers Stephen and Matthew Murtagh have grown up and Sitting Pretty is a reflection of the emotional turbulence of facing the thrills and anxieties that life unforgivingly provides. This time The Academic have cut loose and created a matured sound full of the catchy indie hooks and assured lyricism that brought them the spotlight five years ago, leaving no doubts that this is a band more than ready for their big return. 

In the build up to the record, I caught up with singer Craig Fitzgerland and bassist Stephen Murtagh to ask them about their whirlwind last few years and looking ahead to Sitting Pretty. 

Gigwise: Hey guys! Before we jump into the new era of The Academic, I couldn’t help but notice just how young you were when the band began around high school age. How did you manage it all at such a complex time? 

Craig: So we all went to the same school and got into music around the same time and liked the same bands: Oasis, Kings of Leon, The Killers, The Strokes. I definitely felt the stresses of school, socialising and going out but because we were such close friends around that time, it was our social outlet. We only became The Academic as teenagers, it was almost like music was our football practice in a way where we would always meet up after school and someone would have learnt a new chord or we wanted to do a new cover of something. It felt like a safe space for us. The process of making music now is pretty much spot on to what we were like as teenagers! It’s probably a bit more tech-savvy but the root of the band was always, I’d have an idea in my bedroom and I’d be able to just play it on a guitar and that’s still the stepping stones to how we work: the skeleton of the idea, some chords, melodies, and then we all jump in as a band and create this picture that we’ve all worked on as a creation of four. 

The release of your exciting sophomore album Sitting Pretty is now just days away… What can fans expect from the record come February 10th? 

Craig: I think it’s a natural progression as if it were a film to follow a film! It’s still the same four guys but we’ve grown up a lot as musicians and songwriters, and we’re always trying to be true to ourselves. There’s definitely a lot of familiarity for people when they’ll hear the album, but hopefully fans can see we’ve pushed our comfort zones whilst still trying to stay true to the live product that we are as this live, four piece rock band album. It’s been so long between both albums and we made two EPs in that time which gave us a chance to experiment with producers, studios and more wackier ideas. 

Stephen: I think it’s important to say those two EPs weren’t so cohesive because they’re a different artform to an album so by the time we were in the studio for the new album, it really made us buckle down to make a coherent sound that felt like a proper album. But it was definitely the natural progression from the first to show how much we’ve changed as people, songwriters and musicians. Sitting Pretty has the energy that made people originally like our band, along with obviously Craig’s voice and hints of the sounds we liked from album one, but this time as a more matured version of that. 

I’d read that you acknowledged you could have played it safe both sonically and lyrically and stayed as the band you were in album one, yet Sitting Pretty represents that period of growing up since then. How did you find the transition from album one to two, and was there anything you wanted to do differently this time? 

Craig: Me and Stephen were very much in the process of just gathering songs before we even knew it was an album but we knew we had to be brave with the producer because we’d found a bit of success with Tales From The Backseat. It was this fast, upbeat, indie-centric record but when we sat down this time ready to make an album, everything we were drawing up wasn’t that kind of sound. We began looking into more classic sounds like 60s and 70s music as more pensive songwriting with more thoughtful lyrics, structures and arrangements because we were more hook-based five or six years ago so now we’re letting the song be the most important thing. We needed the bravery to let a song breathe a bit more and let it play out because we were the kings of three minute songs! 

Stephen: I think it would have been really weird had we tried to recreate the first album in the sense of here are ten more indie bangers… It was released five years ago but recorded six years ago so it would be bizarre if we hadn’t changed as writers, musicians or people in how we listened to music. We had to follow our intuition and be the more mature band we are now and begin looking at things from a different perspective. 

One thing I wanted to touch upon is how you guys have dealt with the pressure of making a second album because after the success of Tales From The Backseat, people are always demanding new music so how do you cope with the expectation? 

Stephen: The music industry is obviously very different to what it was five years ago but you’d like to think people aren’t stuck in a traditionalist mindset where they think it’s basically this two year cycle of an album, then a tour to follow because that’s not normal but really there is no normal in this industry. Albums should always take as long as they need to be right and for the artist to be happy with it. I’d like to think we didn’t set an expectation and we hope our fans would think the amount of time it has taken has been worth it. Thankfully I can honestly say we didn’t let the expectation or weight of time lie too heavily on our shoulders, we were just really excited to be back making another album. 

Craig: There was always this ‘second album syndrome’ thing in music where you’d look at an artist’s second album and think yep they’re fucked so there is that pressure probably more on younger musicians but thankfully that didn’t enter any of our brains at all really.

I noticed a lot of Tales From The Backseat was recorded in LA but this time round you stuck by London to work with producer Nick Hodgson - formerly of the Kaiser Chiefs. How was your experience working with him for this one? 

Craig: It was amazing! We go way back with him! The band has always been family-based and Nick was one of those guys we came across in a writing session and we just got along really well. The difference with LA was it felt like a very structured process of meeting a producer and just making an album which we really enjoyed, but with Nick, he genuinely felt like the fifth band member because he cares so much for it. We’d done the Acting My Age EP with him back in 2020 which actually could have been an album but it got cut short with COVID being around. That period gave us a lot of clarity that we knew we wanted to make an album with Nick in London because we knew that just works for us. 

Stephen: It couldn’t have been more different to the first album! The whole travelling to LA and meeting the producer banging out the album after around two months was completely different to how we did things with Nick and having known him for five or six years, it was almost manifesting itself so it felt like the most natural thing in the world to go to a great place like London to make new music with a friend that we really trusted in Nick. 

"We’re always seeing ideas as a glass half full and thinking what if whatever we’re doing turned out brilliant!"

Your fourth single ‘My Very Best’ is the latest to be released and is one that has the energy of a title track. Looking back through your discography, I noticed you never actually include a title track in your albums, is there any reason for that? 

Stephen: I actually think we overthink it for the sake of not putting too much pressure on one song where people will think it’s the epicenter of the record and sometimes that isn’t true. I do find the ordering of songs for an album a really enjoyable process though because it’s like you’ve done the writing and recording and now it’s time to present your songs! I find thinking about why the ends of songs run into the next one so perfectly a really exciting process. We probably had a whiteboard full of around twenty-five or thirty songs that we knew we had to narrow down, which Nick gave us great freedom to do but we had to just follow our gut. 

Craig: I think naming it was my least favourite process of this album. It’s a bit of a learning curve because we knew what the first album was going to be called and this one we kept thinking that’s a good song name… could it be the album title? Everyday Stephen would write a new album name on a whiteboard and sometimes it was helpful but other times the vibe wasn’t right, but I agree there’s too much pressure on a title track because people think it’s the centre of it and I don’t think that’s the case with this album at all. 

One of the unreleased songs off the album, ‘Heartbreaks Where It’s At’ is a bit of an anomaly to the rest of your discography in the sense it feels very much like a dance track. Was it a deliberate move to try and tap into new music styles or was that something that came naturally to you? 

Craig: That song has an interesting story because it was actually Nick’s title. He’d had this for a while and we were playing around a bit one day and then we got the melody and it became this threepiece jam for around twenty minutes, but it felt like a really bad version of stuff we’d done before. We stumbled upon a drum loop and it made us think we’d done things similar in the first album as what we call ‘island songs’ so we thought it’d be fun to build over this loop. It just felt right to have a bit of fun and make the song stand out a bit, like when it comes on you think, oh shit… it’s time to dance! 

Stephen: It was such a fun balancing act of acknowledging your album should have lots of different flavours sonically to keep it interesting but also not doing anything that doesn’t strike a chord like putting it on there for the sake of it kinda thing. A lot of the influences were like LCD Soundsystem or Talking Heads which is music we absolutely adore, so we really wanted that kind of funky, robotic sound to be integrated into this album. 

You’ve always had this creative side in the band. Looking back at the impressive looped music video for ‘Bear Claws’ being one of the first-of-its-kind, in addition to finishing songwriting with fans live on Twitch, to the chance to perform in a fan’s living room… Where does this creative level of intimacy with fans come from? 

Craig: We’re just fans of sharing! There’s obviously the more traditional way of doing it but, not to blow smoke up our own holes, we like listening to people’s ideas outside of the band and noticing a good one when we hear it. The live looper video for ‘Bear Claws’ was a confusing experience for everybody but we have enough shameless confidence to pull these things off. I see them as the little perks of the job which spreads joy! Playing in someone's living room is just the sort of thing we enjoy and we don’t wanna hide away from doing that. 

Stephen: It’s an important thing we’ve always had in whatever we do! It’s the band’s ethos to be open minded and we have a great working relationship with the two directors that work on our music videos, we’re always sharing ideas with them. When things like the looper video come about, we’re always seeing ideas as a glass half full and thinking what if whatever we’re doing turned out brilliant! 

I can’t not mention the Sitting Pretty UK, Europe and North American tour which actually begins on the album’s release day! How much are you looking forward to it? 

Stephen: Honestly, more than anything! Live music has always been the bread and butter to The Academic! We started as a live band, our favourite memories are live moments so I don’t think there’s a scenario where we’re more comfortable than just living out of a suitcase, going on a bus and being in the middle of a big tour - it’s where the band thrives! There are some incredible venues we’ll be playing as well like the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow or the Shepherd’s Bush in London, and then places like New York because we haven’t been to America since around 2016 so I literally couldn’t be more excited for all of it! 

Craig: We did a UK tour last year but we were also racing to get the album done in time so it was amazing but felt a bit like a halfway house tour. We love having new music to play so now that we will actually have something new out, it will be like a new chapter for us. This time round we’ll actually be playing the new album and the thought of it being out and fans having the opportunity to listen to it before coming to the shows is so exciting for everybody!

Sitting Pretty arrives 10th February

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More about: The Academic