It’s been three long years since Two Door Cinema Club have released new music, but finally, the time has come to rejoice, as False Alarm, the band’s fourth studio album, is finally here.
Never resting on their laurels for a second, Two Door Cinema Club are a band whose appeal stems from their willingness to always adapt and change. This time around, they’ve become colourful characters in turtlenecks, whose ambivalence towards the information age is just bursting to be heard.
In fact, it’s this very idea of the age of ‘burnout’ and ‘flashfire consumption’ that drives the entire soul of False Alarm, not only in its songs but in the process of creating it as well. As times have changed, the decade-long career of Two Door Cinema Club has also been met with changes, one of the most obvious ones being the way people consume music.
First, the music was starting with a Myspace account, and now these days people are still buying records, so the way that people are listening to and consuming music is starting to change the way that a lot of people are making it
It’s this nervousness tinged with excitement towards the rapid ways of the new generation that makes the album so special, pulling in both fans of old and new fans into the fold, to come on and pound the alarm together in a newfound harmony.
I spoke with Alex Trimble, lead singer of the band, about how he feels about Two Door Cinema Club having this new wave of success with False Alarm, where old fans are interacting with new fans over the colourful tunes that Trimble hopes, will relieve the stresses of the world we are all so terrifying consumed by.
we thought we would present ourselves as these characters who inhabit this world to make it feel a little more real and a little more tangible.
With your new album so close to being released, how are you feeling?
I feel pretty good. It’s felt like it’s been a long time coming, this records been finished for almost a year, so it’s been difficult just sitting on it and not being able to have anybody hear it so I’m looking forward to the release and having it out there.
You’ve mentioned in interviews that False Alarm is the bands way of pointing out the absurd and bizarre nature of the information/burnout age. How did this idea come about?
It wasn’t really conscious; it’s just been something that’s been really fascinating me. It’s a really great source material, with so much to write about and think about – there are so many places you can go, so when I started writing it just started to become about that, and there it is.
Was the information age and the effects on the human condition that it has been something noticeably present in your/the band’s life?
I mean, it’s changing everybody’s life. We’ve been doing this professionally for ten years, and it was a very different place to work back then. First, the music was starting with a Myspace account, and now these days people are still buying records, so the way that people are listening to and consuming music is starting to change the way that a lot of people are making it.
It’s become a lot faster, and that’s kind of hard to deal with, where more emphasis is put on quantity. We’re an album-band, I guess you could call us. It’s all very important to us, and very important to the development of any band rather. We want to keep making music that way, so it’s a good thing for albums that vinyl is becoming more popular again because vinyl obviously supports the whole concept of the ‘album’, so that’s a good sign.
We’re figuring out how to handle this new technology and new information and all that sort of stuff, we’re just trying to find the balance. Nobody knows what’s happening anymore, and we’ve noticed it a lot in music over the years. Everything is changing and nobody knows how or why.
Do you think that this affects the way that you make new music, with how music consumption has changed?
I don’t think it affects how we make music, I think it affects how people talk to us about the music we make. The people that we work with within the industry, they’re always trying to keep their fingers on the pulse, and everyone is suggesting things that we should do to keep up with what’s going on or try to pre-empt what’s happening next, but I think you’re kind of doomed to fail if you’re following on that trend, it’s just better to make the music that you want to in the time that you want to take to do it.
I guess for some people the new way is working and it’s beneficial, but I don’t think we’d have results that we’d be happy with or proud of if we change how we do it to fit in with what’s going on now in terms of how music is being listened to or consumed.
So essentially by being more authentic to yourself, you’re being truer to yourselves instead of trying to follow trends?
Well yeah, I mean there’s only one reason why we do this. It’s great that this is a job and that we make money, I mean that has to be some consideration when you’re making music, its unpredictable and you want to make sure you can still do this for a living, but ultimately the reason that we do this is because we get a kick out of it, we get a kick out of making music and using it as a way to explore our own world, and so that part has to be there first off when we are making music, because that’s how you end up with good music or good art of any kind I guess.
This new album cover, in contrast with the other ones, finally features the band’s faces. Would you say that is because the album is more personal for the band?
I don’t think so. It’s hard to know objectively how personal this is, I know it sounds strange to say, but these things become more apparent a little bit later. Ultimately though they’re inherently personal, I mean they came out of us, but having us on the record cover was more about creating some sort of world for this album to live in.
It’s always been when we make records that we put a bunch of songs together and then everything comes together, and then everything comes afterwards, you start to think about artwork and music videos, but this time around it was all done more candid.
We were thinking about how the record was going to look, how the record was going to feel, and we love this idea of creating a world where we can bring people in, so we thought we would present ourselves as these characters who inhabit this world to make it feel a little more real and a little more tangible.
You can definitely feel that energy especially in the music videos, there’s definitely a carefree and colourful energy. What inspired this artistic direction?
Well initially it was bands like Kraftwerk and Devo, and bands that play with things visually a lot more than many other bands would. They were creating their own worlds and their own identities, whether it was Kraftwerk with the whole robot vibe or Devo with the Devolution kind of headcases. But also, it seemed like they were having fun. It seemed like it was making the music even more accessible, you were connecting to these characters.
Music, at least to me, feels like this kind of otherworldly kind of thing, so if you’re allowed to indulge in the fact that this is something ‘other’, rather than just some normal guys and some melodies put together. It becomes more of an all-around kind of experience.
And it becomes more enjoyable for the audience as well. They become more involved. They see you having fun and so they want to listen to the music more. Going off that, some of the comments on ‘Talk’, which already has one million views, go along the lines of “this has high meme potential”, was something like that intentional for the band or kind of accidental?
I guess it was accidental. The concept for the video came from Max, the director, and he wanted to try and literally interpret every line in the song. It just seemed like this crazy idea that we were never going to do, because we had one day to film the music video and were planning on shooting 85 or 86 scenes in one day.
So, if anything, we were almost not going to do a video because we thought it was just not going to work because there are so many little bits in pieces. In hindsight though, you’re right, every little snippet can become some sort of meme.
Watch: Two Door Cinema Club – ‘Talk’
You recently mentioned in a BBC interview that you’re aware of bands shelf lives. Did this fact come to play at all in the making of False Alarm?
Yeah, I think so, but not in the way of feeling fear. Really it was the opposite, we were just throwing caution to the wind and making sure we were doing exactly what we wanted. This is such an unpredictable business to be in, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.
You want to do the best you can while you have the chance to. Whether or not a lot of people will stream or buy our records, we’re still going to keep being ourselves. That’s another reason not to be worried about anything, we’ll do this record, we’ll try something we’ve never tried before, and it might go well, or it might not. It’s about not putting any pressure on ourselves.
It’s kind of like a fresh confidence that allows you to not fall for that kind of trap that most bands do who do have shelf lives correct?
Yeah, for sure. It’s taken us a while to get here, and this is the first record where we’ve all kind of had that new attitude that it doesn’t matter, so we may as well give it our best shot. I always think that if we don’t fail and the album does well but we played it safe and we hadn’t really rocked the boat or tried anything new then that would be really heartbreaking, but if we fail but had at least had been interesting or exciting then that’s the main thing that matters.
Yeah, because most creative failures are more memorable than boring successes in a way.
Yeah absolutely. I think it’s better to be interesting than to be popular.
Going off that, you guys have never really rested on your laurels or past experiences, so where do you find inspiration when writing a brand-new set of songs for a brand-new album.
The truth is that we don’t know. You just start writing and it starts to appear in front of you. Sometimes I’ll know that it’s important or it has some significance, but a lot of the times songs won’t kind of reveal themselves until after the fact, but that’s the most exciting part, accepting that you don’t know because it makes the whole process interesting for us as well.
The album from the singles alone kind of has a very fresh, modern sound. Was this something that you guys knew you were going to do or just happened to stumble upon in the process of making music?
We just stumbled upon it. We’ve kind of done that with every record. We never have a solid idea of what this is gonna be or what it’s going to be about or how it’s going to sound. We are more of a studio band than a live band in terms of how we generate music, and so when you’re in this room that’s full of instruments and you’re ideas are the limit really, there’s no concept of whose going to play what instrument or how it’s going to sound.
It’s great that we can work on computers and have everything plugged in and just try stuff out, and kind of just throw every idea down and see what works and how things kind of develop themselves, y’know?
With making a fresh new sound, it already looks like a lot of the older fans are super pleased, and there’s also a big wave of new incoming fans that have never heard of you guys before. How do you feel about entering this new wave of musical success?
I don’t really know. I guess we’ve always been a band that’s always been on the sidelines, where a lot of people don’t know who we are.
A lot of people might be aware of where the music comes from on a subconscious level, since it seems to find its way to a lot of different places, but I always think they know we’re a band that makes records and will always be there, so we may as well keep it fresh and keep trying to renew everything, and maybe older fans will like the music we do now or maybe they won’t, and maybe some new people will like it. Everything is always changing, and people are always changing.
Watch: Two Door Cinema Club – ‘Satellite’
So what are you waiting for? As members of the so-called “heads down” generation, don’t we deserve to have a good time too? Two Door Cinema Club’s new album False Alarm is exactly the kind of party we’ve been waiting for – one that acknowledges the fact that we’re all living in a rapid electronic age yet doesn’t shame us for it. Instead, it revels in the weirdness and absurdity of this new world we live in and invites us all to celebrate our anxieties in one big colourful clash.
Listen to ‘False Alarm’
*False Alarm stream embed*
Saturday 23rd November
Grapevine Estate, VIC
Saturday 30th November
Roche Estate, NSW
Sunday 1st December
Sandalford, WA
Full lineup:
Two Door Cinema Club
Flight Facilities
Crooked Colours
Mallrat
Jack River (VIC & NSW only)
Touch Sensitive
Late Nite Tuff Guy
Kira Puru
Lovebirds (VIC & NSW only)
Big Words
Arno Faraji (Perth only)
