More about: Chalk

Conditions is a messy chaotic blend of punk and noise rock that is an absolute treat to listen to from start to finish. The way the EP is put together is unpredictable and filled with tension and energy, elements that are difficult to capture in music whilst still making something that’s listenable and offers replay value. Chalk do it though, on what is without doubt one of the best punk releases of the year.

The EP is made up of 5 songs: Asking, Static, Them, Velodrome and Conditions. Here, the trio from Belfast take us through their new EP track by track, showing us the calculated approach taken to create the perfect blend of chaos and cohesion on ‘Conditions’.

Asking

We like to write songs with a particular setting in mind and where it would feel most organic. In this case for Asking, it was designed to be the opening track for our EP and played live in dark rooms filled with haze and projections on us. The track was approached on paper to also be the opening for our first run of shows. That intro riff was sort of inspired by a Hans Zimmer a la Johnny Marr film score, trying to create a bit of tension from the get go. There’s a scene from Wings of Desire that influenced the lyrics heavily - “I rest my head on his shoulder.” A man on top of a building in Berlin wants to jump off and there’s an angel resting their head on his shoulder. We paid homage to it in our music video for the track, it’s a fantastic film that has had a great impact on us as a band.

Static

Static was written pretty quickly, once I brought a couple of bass and guitar ideas to Luke’s house and the drums were laid down. It was our chance to explore the feelings of not knowing your place in the world, and feeling completely motionless and tied down within the confinements of order, regime, and monotonous instruction: “Stand up straight, a pre-owned smile” / “There’s been a knock on my door, they’re gonna try and burn me down.”

But importantly, the song dives into the idea of pushing through those barriers and trying to gain control of your life and find purpose: “Searching for something to do, just to keep myself right” However, in this case, the pathway, and whether it has any kind of ending or cathartic moment, is uncertain: “I could’ve sworn that I’d cut the cord”. This idea of the protagonist in the song moving into the darkness with wavering doubts and just a glimmer of hope fascinated us.

Them

‘Them’ is a song about how our insecurities and deepest fears can resurface in our dreams and nightmares. We wanted to explore the psychology of dreams and how they can be interpreted. It was the first song we released on this EP and very much felt like an introduction to us as a band not just sonically but also visually. We worked on the music video together from scratch and it really helped cement our aesthetic and DIY approach as not just a band, but filmmakers recently out of film school. The goal was to have the track relentlessly driving forward with a bassline and four-to-the-floor techno club kick drum - implementing this opened our eyes to it being a theme throughout the EP.  It was the first Chalk track we did as well as our first time being in a studio.

Velodrome

Best song title we’ve got. It was in the book for a few years and felt that it always deserved a big sound. It started with a bass riff that I had written in 2020 and it lay dormant for a while. For a different track, I began to play around with breakbeat loops and chopping up vocal samples and then tried dropping the bass line in, enter Velodrome.  

Velo was a tricky track to write musically. When we went into the studio, we had like 4/5 different versions as we wanted to travel through different sonic worlds throughout the track but still within this universe of Velodrome. It follows the inner thoughts of a dying man on his deathbed, wandering through his memories and eventually passing away at the end. My favourite bit is what we have called “The Choking Robot” (0:13 into the track) which is just heavily distorted screaming sliced up into some to match the song. 

Conditions

This track was an absolute mind fuck to write for about 2 years. It honestly had about 8/9 different versions and we kept hitting our head up against the wall. The only reason we kept working on it was because the middle instrumental section of music was my favourite thing I’d ever done musically (so far). There was this guitar amp drone tone effect on Logic Pro X called “Diaphanous” I found and just fell in love with it. It was around that time when we began to take writing more seriously as the band and was trying to grab as many new sounds as possible. That drone tone effect has made it into 80% of our music.

The track was originally called “Psalms” but felt that if it ever got radio play and the presenter said, ”and that was Psalms by Chalk” some people may look up “Sams” or some sort of misspelling. Luke and Ben came up with Conditions, which is the EP. The new title prompted lyrical themes for the track as well as a narrative for the entire EP.

This track is our way of summarising everything that life brings to us as people, both good and bad, in our dreams and in our relationships, in our struggle to find out who we really are, wrestling to discover what our purpose is, and where we belong in this world. We wanted “Conditions” to capture the essence of everything we've touched on throughout the EP and bring all of these emotions together, to a sort of catharsis. 

We would personally like to thank our producer Chris Ryan for helping us make sense of the mind-fuck demo and transform it into a cohesive track once we hit the studio. Conditions is the song we finish our live shows with right now and would be our favourite track on the EP.

You can check out the brand new EP ‘Conditions’ now

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More about: Chalk