![]() ![]() We were all staying there so we’d spend the night together drinking or whatever and then the whole day making music.” Conor was in another room behind the drum set. “It felt like going to a kids’ club in summer,” grins Jordan. While the album was mostly recorded at The Nave, it benefitted from a week at a farm in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, a “retreat” which the producer’s friends turned into a recording studio. It’s also the product of different environments, with songs written everywhere from at home in Hull to driving through the Alps, as they have become a touring band. I always think the first record feels like one person’s relationship, whereas this is so much broader, and can be interpreted in different ways.” “Everything’s still probably based on things that have happened to me,” he explains, “but I’m writing more ambiguously, so that it can be understood by others in whatever situation they’re going through. This time, the songs still come from a personal place but are more wide-ranging and more universal. On Bedroom, Ryan was writing mainly from a personal perspective - about relationship break-ups, substance abuse and mental health, issues anyone can relate to especially after three years of pandemic, war and economic crisis. Musically they experimented with everything from “pure atmospherics” to eight-minute songs but lyrically, it was more a case of expanding and developing what was already there. So we were thinking, ‘What else can we do?’ ” His younger brother Jordan (bass, now also keyboards) has been checking out Steve Reich and Boards Of Canada and says, “A lot of it is just us gaining confidence, and also not wanting to retread old ground. “We’re still coming from the same place, but the influences have got much broader,” confirms singer-guitarist Ryan Smith. Whatever has produced it, it’s a bigger-sounding, more tuneful, really rather fantastic second statement by four young men who are rightly sure about what they’re doing and loving every minute of it. There are ambient washes and delicate piano pieces, while influences or reference points veer from Radiohead to My Bloody Valentine to The Cure to Brian Eno, and even the classical minimalism of Erik Satie. Fragile ambient pieces line up against pulverising guitar chords, sometimes within the same song. Again recorded at The Nave studio in Leeds with producer Alex Greaves ( Working Men’s Club, Bo Ningen), the band’s trademark effects-laden guitars and motorik Neu! grooves have now been augmented by piano, strings, electronica, sampling and even occasional dance beats. It’s contemporary shoegaze in a way - but much, much more. Three years on, the band’s sophomore album I Don’t Know takes the adventure somewhere else. chart not once but three times, ended up on year-end lists and turbo-boosted the band’s streeaming audience, which now numbers just short of 300,000 listeners each month. Released on a small label, it was hailed by media far and wide, championed by DJs up and down the dial, entered the U.K. T HE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “While the world became socially distanced in 2020, Hull’s post-shoegaze, dream-pop, heavy-guitar-effects quartet Bdrmm made the kind of impact with their debut album any young band would dream about. ![]()
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