A Place To Bury Strangers
Having run levels into the red on sound desks across the world, New York City’s A Place to Bury Strangers bring their mesmerising mix of pain and pleasure back to Australia with brand new album, Pinned. Their fifth full length album finds them converting difficult moments into some of their most urgent work to date. Quickly garnering acclaim from their stunning performances with Brian Jonestown Massacre, it has been the band’s increasingly chaotic live performances that built their legion of fans and seen them applauded as the revival of “the ominous, feedback-drenched drones of the 1980s” The New York Times. The band answer a few questions for Hi Fi Way: The Pop Chronicles ahead of the tour.
How much are you looking forward to touring Australia?
I can’t wait to be over there. It’s freezing cold in NY and I have been cooped up recording music and soldering for weeks. We’ve also been writing a lot of new music and we’ll be debuting some of the songs on this tour.
How would you describe A Play To Bury Strangers to Australian music lovers?
If you like crazy messed up super intense music you will have never seen anything like this. We will bite through microphones, beat through drum heads and throw a guitar higher than you’ve seen anyone before all while blasting out drugged up art school reject pop numbers shredded by feedback and beat down by a pounding heartbeat drum kit.
What inspired the band name?
The band was named by the original drummer of the band Justin Avery and he took the inspiration from Aleister Crowley. If you are ever in Milwaukee, look him up. He’s a good dude and a hell of a rad country song writer.
Is it even more exciting touring off the back of a new album?
For me it is exciting to always be moving and always doing something different. This record has us doing a lot of things we have never done before so it is a challenge to pull some of it off live and that’s exciting.
Was Pinned the most challenging album the band has made to date?
I don’t know. We really put everything we have into every record so it probably would have been too challenging to do when I recorded the first record but I still am always compelled to push myself completely. Time really runs out when creating a record and so we desperately scramble to do everything we possibly can to make the record as good as possible.
Were the songs well formed before going in to the studio?
Some of the songs on this record are the actual demos themselves where some of them we worked for a long time practising and perfecting before we went in to record them.
Did the songs change much during the recording process?
Some of them did. You really have to not be afraid to totally destroy what you are working on to make it the best so that happened a few times on the record all for the best.
Does the band ever revisit leftover songs that don’t make?
No, we don’t, but there are tons of songs which never get released.
Are there many ideas floating around for what might be the next album?
We’ve been working on it. The main thing we are focusing on at the moment is working on making everyone in the band have equal voice as to what goes on with the record and I think it is coming out really great so far. Usually in the past I would dictate a lot and kind of control the project but this time we are doing things differently and it’s exciting.
What’s next for the band?
World domination and tea.
Interview Rob Lyon
Catch A Place To Bury Strangers on the following dates…
