Nathan Willett is pacing around the studio trying to get reception ahead of Cold War Kids’ Australian tour. It has, after all, been eighteen months since the release of their fifth LP Hold My Home and the time for a follow-up is fast approaching. But there’s one more overdue box to be ticked before they put the current album cycle to bed: an Australian tour.
“We’re just in a place where we had a whole lot of momentum,” he tells ripitup.com.au of Hold My Home’s creation. “We’d done Dear Miss Lonelyhearts before it and Matt Maust and I had done this side project French Style Furs and we just wanted to get right back in again.”
“So I think it was really about momentum and keeping that energy alive,” he says.
A decade on from their debut Robbers & Cowards, the band’s newly prolific run saw them reawaken their live roots in the studio.“For a band like us to start off as such a live band and go in the studio and just do it live and record the songs as you’ve been playing… that always changes over the years,” he says. “You have the luxury of trying to do more, and do better, find better sounds, do something great in the studio.”
“But it can also derail you if you lose some of that vision,” he says. “And I do think that happened to us before. It’s a precious thing to hold on to, it’s a hard thing to hold on to for ten years and we definitely made our way out of that.”
At this stage in a band’s career, a live setting can prove a prescient reminder of exactly where you peaked – vocal fans exclusively demanding older cuts can quickly invalidate years of new material. But with tracks like First proving to be instant anthems upon Hold My Home’s release in 2014, that hasn’t been a problem for Willett and co., and they couldn’t be happier. “It’s the best thing you could hope for,” he says. “Just by being on tour, the amount of energy it takes to perform each night you want your current work to be important, and you know how hard that is.
“Miracle Mile, First and All This Could Be Yours are all songs from the last couple of records that we play every night and are the high points of the set. [There’s] the whole question of ‘is what we’re doing urgent, is it going where we want it to go,’” he says. “Then you have those moments where you play those songs… this year was amazing for us where we played big festivals like Lollapalooza and you just go ‘oh wow, the new stuff is urgent’.”
That immediacy was bore out in the creation of tracks like First. “First was an example of something that was very organic, and we weren’t sure if we’d put it on the record. [It] seemed like a weird song, on a B-side maybe,” he says. “And I think that unassuming sort of approach helped. Lyrically I didn’t try to overthink it, tried to keep it… there’s a lot of ambiguity in the lyrics. “It seems very poetic to me in a way that’s both very concrete scene but could be interpreted many ways.”
As for the new material, it’s unclear whether it will be ready in time for inclusion in the band’s Australian sets (“we’re right on the edge,” Willett says). Either way, the band are enjoying their continued creative streak, bolstered by the contributions of recent addition Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse, The Shins).
“When you have new people come in it’s such a great thing because there’s already an established sound, it has been from the beginning of Cold War Kids,” he says of the curious sensation of hearing pro musicians reinterpret your own band’s sound back to you. “So it doesn’t reinvent the sound but it does improve upon it and that’s great.
“It’s strange but it’s so perfect.”
Cold War Kids play HQ Complex on Tuesday, March 22. Tickets via OzTix.
COLD WAR KIDS AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES
Sunday, March 20 – Metropolis, Fremantle – TICKETS
Tuesday, March 22 – HQ Complex, Adelaide – TICKETS
Friday, March 25 – 170 Russell, Melbourne – TICKETS
Saturday, March 26 – Metro Theatre, Sydney – TICKETS
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