The Brag

The War On Drugs
Come To The City
By Alasdair Duncan 

The War On Drugs’ Slave Ambient was a great big mystery of an album, its beautiful, fuzzed-out songs coming on a little Bruce Springsteen and a little Sonic Youth. It was also an album of obsessive details – chief songwriter Adam Granduciel spent years in the studio perfecting it, tinkering with tape loops and playing around with synths and pedals to get everything just right. It was an exhausting process, but one that taught Granduciel quite a bit about himself, as well as his music. “I don’t like to record in pristine settings,” he explains, “so most of the songs on this record started out at home. I have a bit of studio equipment set up there, a tape machine and some weird effects. I spent a lot of time there just recording weird overdubs, experimenting, then I would go to the studio for a few days to try and pick all those recordings apart and hear all the different things that were happening.”

Listening to the album feels a little like being in a dream, which is fitting given how much of it came from Granduciel’s unconscious mind. “I really felt like I was inside the record,” he tells me. “When I was recording it, I discovered a great many things about myself as a musician and a writer, and I tried to just soak it all in.” He didn’t put a lot of focus on the lyrics – he just let them come as he was shaping the music. “I feel like they really just came out of me,” he says. “I was really excited about being alive and being a musician, and I was really just focusing on that, and on the arrangements of the songs. I mean, there are a few lyrics that were consciously written, about a trip I’d taken or something like that, but for the most part they were unconscious. I just let them flow out of me, just trying to capture feelings.”

Getting Slave Ambient finished was a momentous task for Granduciel, but now it’s done he feels that the process for the band’s next record will be a lot more streamlined. “I might use some of the same methods, but it might only take a year instead of three or four,” he laughs. “I spent a lot of time with this record going down roads just to see if I really wanted to go down them – I’d spend two months on a different version of a song just to see if it made me feel any different from the version I’d just finished, but I would never end up using that second idea. I’d always go back to the original feeling.” Doing this taught him to trust his instincts, and as a writer and producer he now feels like he’s found an easier way to make a record. “I’ve realised that you can make a record that you’re proud of and do it a lot more quickly than you might think, as long as you trust yourself to know what feels right.”

Granduciel will be bringing The War On Drugs to Australia for Harvest Festival later this year, and I’m interested to know how those strange, intricate songs from Slave Ambient will translate from studio to stage. “Live, it’s a little bit more of a rock record,” he explains. “We don’t use any computers or anything like that on stage, but there are a couple of drum machines we used on the record that we bring along, for example. We have a few samplers and bits of gear to try and get some of those studio sounds as well. But at the end of the day I wrote that record in the studio, so rather than make the songs sound just like the studio versions, all I can do is just play them – I mean, you’ll always know what song you’re hearing, they don’t change that drastically, but they’re different.”

The songs on Slave Ambient were written in a very unconventional way, but having played them live for a year, Granduciel feels pretty confident that he’s found his way into them. “We don’t alter the songs drastically or play them super loud or anything, and we play as much as we can from the albums and EPs. I mean, ‘The Animator’ is in there, so we cover a lot.” I’d been curious about this track, one of the electronic interludes from Slave Ambient, and am glad to hear that it makes it into the show. “Yeah, we can do it with some loop stuff,” he explains. “Robbie [Bennett, keys & guitar] has a couple of synths, I play a harmonica, so it’s cool. Sometimes we’ll play it for less than a minute and sometimes for three or four, depending on how it’s going.”

Granduciel is used to playing European festivals, where you fly in, play, and fly right out again, so the idea of travelling around Australia with Harvest is pretty exciting. “There’s so much great stuff on the bill,” he says. “I mean, Beck’s playing, you’ve got Grizzly Bear, Sigur RЧs… With Harvest, we get to travel and see every band we want to see, which is really great. You don’t often get the chance to do that, so I’m really excited!”