Bursting onto the scene in the mid-2000s, the Wombats, along with contemporaries like the Kooks and Two Door Cinema club, were part of a movement of swaggering indie-rock bands, bringing a youthful energy and a mischievous sense of humour to the stone-faced world of alternative music.
Over a decade later, despite having mellowed with age, the band are still going strong, performing a string of sold-out shows to an audience who remain devout.
Ahead of their gig in the Academy last night, drummer Dan Haggis sat down with The University Times to talk about the new album, the development of their unique sound and the importance of collaboration.
While the Wombats were once the poster boys for young indie culture, one could easily expect their status to have diminished with age. On the contrary, however, Haggis describes how, even now, their music seems to connect with a younger audience: “Despite thinking that the crowd are maybe going to get older with us they actually seem to stay at the same sort of level. For some reason most of our gigs in Australia, UK, America, Europe the first ten rows are always sort of 16-20 year-olds just moshing and going crazy.”
He feels like this could be due to the enduring popularity of their original hits “with people sharing our older stuff it doesn’t really feel like we’ve lost that connection with younger fans”, though he jokingly adds that “maybe we’ve all got Peter Pan syndrome”.
Certainly, recent years have seen the band going back to their roots. After an extended foray into the world of synthesizers and electro-pop, new album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life sees a return of the bombastic guitar-riffs and alt-rock feel of their earlier material. Haggis claims that this was, at least to some extent, intentional: “One of the first songs we wrote together was one of the last songs on the album, ‘I Don’t Know Why I Like You But I Do’ and we literally were just like ‘right drums, bass, guitar, where are we going?’ and we just started jamming with it.”
This move back to basics, however, is not an indication of any ill-will towards their more electronics-infused records: “Personally for me it wasn’t because we were like ‘I don’t like [previous albums] Glitterbug or This Modern Glitch. It wasn’t that. It was more just like it’s fun to try something new”.
Changes in musical influence aside, one thing that has endured throughout the band’s records is their dark sense of humour. Early songs featured tongue-in-cheek references to Bridget Jones and Chris de Burgh, and the lead single from their most recent outing centres on a charmingly absurd metaphor about bringing a lemon to a knife fight. Trying to match these lyrics musically is something which Haggis emphasises: “If the music was much more downbeat and grungier sounding, I think the humour in the lyrics would seem even darker, because you’d actually probably pick up more on the darker side to the lyrics.”
The band strives to achieve a “juxtaposition between the lyrics and the music”, ensuring that their music is something you can dance to: “That’s one of the things with music in general, it helps you through periods of like tough times”, says Haggis, adding that “we’ve done the occasional slower song but in general it’s always like the energy from the three of us I think is when we’re really happy and we’re making something that’s really fun”.
These upbeat, high-energy tracks lend themselves well to a live setting, and the band have developed a reputation for intense, energetic live shows. Indeed, it didn’t take long for last night’s Academy gig to turn into a high octane affair, with a mosh pit forming within moments of the first note sounding. While live shows by no means inform the band’s songwriting, they often consider how a song will play live if “we get to a section in a song and we’re not sure where to go next”.
This tour sees them playing in some impressive venues, including London’s Alexandra Palace. Discussing the band’s feelings in anticipation of the tour, Haggis says that they are “just really excited to be honest”.
“There’s this like three-month period once you’ve submitted the album, waiting basically, and no-one’s heard anything and then all of a sudden you’re in a room in a different city and people are singing along. It’s like ‘oh wow, it’s actually getting out there and people are into it’”.
Trying to achieve their distinctive sound has involved collaboration with a number of well-known producers, most recently Bastille veteran Mark Crew and Wolf Alice’s Catherine Marks. While the band co-produce all of their albums, and “always record our demos ourselves to a pretty high standard”, Haggis describes the importance of a good external producer: “If we said to them like ‘oh we want it to be a bit more psychedelic’ or whatever, it’s nice to be able to throw a word at them and then just walk out the room for a bit.”
He describes how Crew spent hours working on album opener “Cheetah Tongue” and “just added 20 per cent more excitement to the track”.
“I think, for the three of us to have someone there to mediate and not let us three butt heads and stuff, someone to go down the rabbit holes with you and showcase your idea properly is really really useful.”
Shortly after 2015’s Glitterbug, the band released a follow-up EP of unreleased material, and they have form for putting out non-album singles between releases.
Haggis confirms that the plan is to continue this pattern, and release more material in the near future: “We were supposed to record two more songs but we didn’t end up having time, so we’re going to record them in May” with a potential release date in September. He describes the volume of extra material they’ve built up over the years: “We’ve got a bunch of other songs that we never released and then there’s loads of rarities from like our first EPs when we first started in Liverpool. The other week I was on a skiing holiday and my cousin actually has them all on his phone and we were listening through each of them and it was like ‘fuck I’d forgotten about this song’.”
“I was just like ‘we have to release these one day’ like it would be so interesting for people to see where we came from in like 2004, 2005, 2006 before our first album. And there’s some great songs back then”, he said.
While the last few years have seen many alternative bands face difficulties, Haggis argues that the Wombats are here to stay: “I think for us three anyway regardless of whether the people like the music still, it’s more important for us that the three of us are still friends and actually want to make music together and want to get up on stage every night.”
“We try and make an effort to put friendship before the band and stuff in a way which is not always easy”, he said.
Even while navigating the pressures of touring however: “You have to put out good music, otherwise you’d be playing to like a couple of people and their dog”, which, he adds “is still fun but you won’t be touring around the world”.
