We’ve been big, big fans of U.K. indie champs Wild Beasts for a long time now, ever since they broke onto the scene with their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Limbo Panto – and they’ve been very busy since then.
Boy King is their fifth album, and sees them “back to being pissed off” after their reflective 2014 record Present Tense. Perth-born singer Hayden Thorpe may even be a bit pissed off at himself, stating “On the last day of making Boy King I had a minor breakdown in knowing what part of myself I was revealing. It’s a bit ugly, a bit grubby, arrogant.”
Obviously not ones to keep anything hidden away, the band have broken down each and every one of these tracks for us – tracks that, while apparently dealing with some ugliness, do so in absolute style with crunchy electronic bombast.
Boy King is available now through Domino Recording Co. on vinyl and CD, including a deluxe edition with a bonus 7″.
Photo by Tom Andrew
Big Cat
The first song we felt we truly nailed for the record, and sort of set us on the path we were going.
The opening synth is Hayden’s voice sampled and layered, and my guitar at the end was John Congleton demanding “more like Andy Gill! Whiter!”. Something to do with how laid back it was, how it kept it in its pants, chose it as the opener.
Tough Guy
From the sublime to the ridiculous. This one is a real macho performance, a show of strength and power that suggest the absence of both.
We attempted to reference the Scorpions and Grace Jones with this one, and the that’s-so-retarded-that’s-awesome guitar solo at the end seemed the icing on top of the hair-funk cake.
Alpha Female
A hymn of praise, an inversion of manliness – feminist cock rock. Masculine weakness and stupidity and female resilience and strength.
We’ve played with these themes our whole career, and just now felt the need to really nail out colours to the mast. And shred our arses off.
Get My Bang
You could say that Dallas, Texas rubbed off on us. This track begun as the centrepiece of the record, before getting whittled down into its current, unvarnished state.
I think it’s fair to say that we’re wearing our learning lightly on this record, and once we found an approach, this one was done in about 3hrs, lyrics and all, all those beautiful chord inversions reduced down to a crude mash of the palm on a synthesiser. A blast.
Celestial Creatures
Very much a song written in London, and one that didn’t change much from the demo. Hayden wrote the lyrics after a heavy night of techno in Brixton, and whistled the melody into his phone.
We were after the feeling of things flying past you in the city at night, sort of a psychedelic number, with trance synths and Nine Inch Nails guitars underpinning it. The vocal that finishes the whole thing couldn’t be quiet enough.
2BU
A revenge fantasy, a playing out of all the things you’ll never get to do. Here in the UK you sort of never escape where you started, and the inferiority complex is writ large on this one.
Chris is drumming in 4/4, though no one seemed to be able to pick that out, and there is rare sighting of acoustic guitar on an otherwise roided-up record. Also only fair to mention Throwing Muses here, who had an influence.
He The Colossus
For my money, the best chorus on the record, and a song that felt the scalpel of John Congleton, and almost found the cutting room floor.
Benny’s guitar work on this was too good to miss mind you, and the shit storm we kick up whilst Hayden sings beautifully about his pain is the entire point of the album, the Nile Rodgers stuff and the Tony Iommi stuff.
Ponytail
Written, I shit you not, on a MPC sampler. The submissive female vocaloid that begins the track is supposed to appear cute, but dominate the track. Hayden was visited by the bass fairy for this one, and his bassline was the glue that brought this collection of disparate samples and shards of ideas together.
The lyric “I saw death up the skirts of the world”, is, if I may toot my own horn, my favourite I have personally written.
Eat Your Heart Out Adonis
We thought we were Sly & The Family Stone, John heard this and told us “that’s so awkward, it’s awesome, you guys sound like Kraftwerk”.
As befits a Limey band in America, we played as clean and as awkward as we could, and John put the wrong sounds in the wrong place. Add some blue chip lead singer moves from Hayden, and some wrong time/wrong place guitars, and it tied together nicely the threads of the record.
Dreamliner
When the walls of the house fall down, and you realise it was just a set all along. We had a huge electronic arrangement, and reduced it down to a tiny, broken piano ballad.
We thought the record needed context, a moment where all that sadness and defeat comes spilling out, and the swagger is no longer possible. Our one concession to our love of synth ballads, very proud of this one.
