Last we’d heard from the Perth raised, now London-based electro-rock act Pendulum, they were planning on taking a year’s hiatus to rest and figure out ideas for their third album.
Their planned hiatus was first revealed to fans last August, after the massively popular dance outfit played V Festival in the UK, telling the packed crowd, “we want to thank everyone who has supported Pendulum over the last five years. We’re going to take next year off to make a new album and then we’ll be back in 2013. We look forward to seeing you all then.”
Now it seems they’ve changed their tune, with a break that may be indefinite.
In a recent interview with Triple J, the drum and bass group’s leader, Rob Swire, talked about how he and co-founder Gareth McGrillen had used their new project Knife Party as a way of distancing themselves from Pendulum, which the co-founders found had stopped ‘being fun’.
Speaking of his decision, Swire said, “I guess we’d been doing Pendulum for ten years and that’s a pretty long time to be doing anything I guess. We were still playing tracks like “Blood Sugar” that we made when we were 18 or 19. To still be doing that ten years later, it just felt like time to do something else.”
That something else is essentially Knife Party, the duo’s new electro-house outfit with a distinctly dubstep influence. Though they’ve yet to release a debut album, the pair have already spent most of their time focussed on their new project. “[It’s] going so well we don’t really feel like going back to junior school anytime soon,” says Swire.
“We’re having too much fun with this project. It’s also great because Pendulum towards the end sort of felt like we were doing it because we had to and that’s never a fun way to do music. Whereas Knife Party is pretty much solely us doing what we want to and if no one likes it we don’t care.”
While Swire did not officially say the band had split up, it’s interesting to note that he could only refer to Pendulum in the past tense, “I don’t know if we’ve outgrown it because it just evolved into something else in the end,” he recalls, “but it was time for something new and the music scene itself had changed. Rock bands are having a pretty hard time at the moment and we weren’t a rock band but with Pendulum we had the band format. We just decided that in 2012 it was time to put that down for a bit.”
Another disconcerting turn for the group’s future is Rob Swire’s twitter account, whose description now sports the grimly succinct note, “PS: There will be no further Pendulum live shows. There are no current plans for a new album in 2013.”
So if you were planning on a farewell tour from the drum n bass act, it looks like their demise might be slinking quietly into the night, or loudly, if you happen to be at a Knife Party gig.
