White Lies: The Comeback Kings

Two years have passed since White Lies became one of the UK’s finest bands with their award-winning debut ‘To Loose My Life’ in 2009. Since then, they’ve toured constantly across the globe, and left an army of fans wanting more.

Now they’re back with new album ‘Ritual’. Before it all kicks off, Gigwise caught up with singer Harry McVeigh and bassist Charles Cave about the album and their new love for Nine Inch Nails.

How have the last 12 months been? Has it been good getting back in the studio?

Charles - Yeah it’s been a change.  It’s still been pretty hectic though we’ve still had to work pretty hard finishing the record off.  But more importantly finish a record that we’re happy with.  

Harry - We’ve still been playing quite a few shows.  In the summer we were pretty much recording all week 5 days a week then playing a festival each day on the weekends.  So we were pretty much working solidly for a couple of months. It was hard work but good fun.

How was the American tour with Kings Of Leon?

Harry - It was amazing. We went to a lot of places in America that you wouldn’t usually go to as an English band.

What were the audiences like over there?

Charles - They were pretty good.  For the fact that we were a support band and they’d never heard a thing about us and we were a little old band from England. Kings Of Leon treated us very well.

You took quite a while off to record the album? Did you do it in one block?

Charles - No we did it in one straight run really, with a week of a bit of rest of writing and recording.

Harry – We did five weeks writing, then a couple of weeks off doing other things but we were still working.  Then six weeks recording.

Did you use the same writing technique on this album as the first?

Harry – Yeah Charles writes the lyrics and together we make the music, we did it completely differently for the first record.  On the first record we sort of cobbled the songs together over six months.  

We did demo a few of [the songs] kind of but we sort of wrote them by learning how to play them as we went along and playing as much as we could as a three piece.  But with this album we used my laptop in the sitting room of my parent’s house. We recording things like a writer would make some notes or an artist sketch things.  

Do you tend to keep your touring and writing separate?

Charles - We need to be in a bubble when writing. We don’t like to be disturbed when we’re writing.  We sort of throw things out to people and it’s fine for them to make comments and respond to what were doing but it’s nice having the confides of a living room or a bedroom.  You sort of hide out in there and get into it.

Harry – We got into a routine which was quite nice.  I like to compare me and Charles to the artists’ Gilbert & George whilst we were writing.  We would go out to the Café every morning and have a substantial cooked breakfast and then go back to mine and make s*it loads of coffee and sit down all day and write.  Which was cool, it’s how I imagine that’s how they do their art.

Charles – We once had breakfast with them; well they sat in the same Café as me and Harry.

Did you feel any pressure making the second album; did you have a set time scale from the record company?

Harry - No not time wise.  They wanted a good record, as any record company would but no we weren’t.  Maybe we would have been if we had taken longer but it didn’t take that long to write and record it so we were way ahead of schedule the whole time.  I think the only pressure we felt came from ourselves.  To deliver something we were happy with.  It’s a very selfish way of writing music but it was all about us and then fortunately everybody else seemed to enjoy it as well.

White Lies - 'Bigger Than Us'

Did you road test any of the tracks before you recorded them?

Charles – No not before we recorded.

Harry – We sort of had one that we played a couple of times whilst we were recording the album but we knew that song was good anyway so we didn’t need to road test it.  It’s a really good process though, learning how to play the songs live.  I really enjoyed it.

The first album had such a distinctive sound.  Did you want to move on from that for this album?

Charles – I don’t think we really thought about it. It just kind of assumed it would happen because we were listening to lots of different music and had different experiences.  We got a whole new idea of what song writing was and what we wanted to create; it’s nothing we ever discussed.

Harry – I think we just moved beyond the first album quite quickly.

You worked with Alan Moulder on this album, who has previously worked with Nine Inch Nails.  Did he have a big impact?    

Charles – I don’t think he did intentionally.  We subconsciously thought that we might as well try out some of these things as he’s very experienced in recording them.  

Did you take any of the electronic influences from Nine Inch Nails?

Harry - Yeah I probably think that’s from listening to Nine Inch Nails before we recorded the album.  I found that I was listening to them a lot with the knowledge that we were working with Alan. It was music that I had genuinely hadn’t listened to that much before and hadn’t got into. But now after listening to them, I f*cking love them. I think that’s why we wanted to incorporate some more electronic elements.

Did you want to be more ambitious with this album?

Harry – We defiantly pushed ourselves more.  We didn’t set out to be more ambitious, we just wanted to be.  That’s just what happened to us as people and musicians, I think we’ve learnt so much over the past couple of years.  

Charles – The only thing we wanted to do was make a better album than the first one.  Considering that the first one did pretty well, it’s quite an ambitious thing for us to say.  I suppose most bands couldn’t and wouldn’t beat their first album that got them that much success.  We don’t know what’s going to happen but we feel we have done it with this album.

The first album was very lyrically intense, has this continued?

Charles - Yeah it’s still very intense but it’s a lot more confident this time. I think the first album was a bit troublesome in a way with the lyrics because we were all very unsure of what we were doing.  When we were recording the first album it wasn’t a very pleasant experience, we were constantly concerned about how the album would do. When we were recording it we just assumed we would be touring 300 capacity venues and that would be it.

Have you enjoyed recording this one more?

Charles - So much more.  Just the way we did this one was so much better.  

Are you looking forward to playing the record live now?

Harry – It will be good to get fans to hear the new stuff and learn them as well.  Playing at the York Hall gig was really enjoyable.

'Ritual' is released on January 17.