Howling Bells

Mon 9th Mar, 2009 in Features

“It’s just kicking off,” enthuses Howling Bells frontwoman Juanita Stein, “so we’re all very excited.”

And so she should be – already, the former Sydney-based band has been touted as a likely breakthrough act in 2009, thanks to the strength of their second album, Radio Wars. It arrives some three years after their self-titled debut…which itself came a little while after I’m Already Home, the more jangly pop effort released under the name Waikiki. It was after touring all around Australia behind that release that the band upped sticks and shifted to England, where they transformed.

Dropping much of the happier, poppier sounds of Waikiki, the beast that was Howling Bells emerged as a much darker, more dangerous, and much more exciting proposition. Now, with Radio Wars set to take them to another level again, Howling Bells are ready to crank up all over again, and are even more excited to see what the future holds.

“I think we feel a lot more confident this time,” she says of the band’s mindset moving forward. “We’ve got probably a little bit more to say than on the first record. We’re a little bit older, we’ve been through a lot more, we’ve learnt more, and we’ve experienced more things, and inevitably you feel you have a lot more to express.”

The band had a completely different experience making the second album in comparison with the first. Where Howling Bells was made in the countryside in England, Radio Wars was recorded in a studio in Los Angeles with producer Dan Grech-Marguerat, otherwise known as regular Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich’s right-hand man. “He came into our rehearsal studio to meet us and had a whole lot of handwritten notes he’d made about our demos. It was very encouraging.”

Having already established a significant base of operations in England, where their debut was lauded by all and sundry, presumably the next step for the group is to look at the American marketplace. “It’s an absolute focus for us,” Juanita confirms.

Having developed in Australia, moved to the UK, and now with their focus on the United States, the band’s focus is widespread. Their eyes have always been wide open, and Juanita doesn’t believe that these opportunities would have opened up for the group if they had stayed in Australia or stayed as Waikiki.

“It’s not so much about one territory being better. It’s just more focussed in England than it is in Australia, which is not demeaning any of the bands here, but one of the things that became instantly apparent to me when moving to the UK is that the music industry is just as important over there as politics or art or sport. I think if you want to spend the rest of your life dedicated to the arts then you have to find a place that nurtures that, and that’s what we felt like we had to do.”

Radio Wars is, for the most part, very much a logical progression for the band’s sound – it’s got darker elements, with Joel Stein’s swirling guitar at the forefront alongside Juanita’s frankly stunning vocal presence. The one exception, however, comes right in the middle of the album in the sound of the sentimental and surprising Let’s Be Kids. It’s the sort of song that seems certain to polarise.

“Where we placed it was deliberate,” she says of where it falls in the album’s song order, “but how we wrote it was completely natural. We recorded all the songs in L.A. and were starting to mix them and then one morning in London Joel knocked on my door and said – œI’ve got a really good idea for a song’. He sat down and I picked up a guitar too and it came together in about three-and-a-half minutes, and we looked at each other and really, really wanted it to be on the record. We organised to go back into a studio in London and spent two days recording that song.”

In fact, there were three late-coming songs that weren’t recorded in the L.A. sessions that ended up making the final cut on Radio Wars. “We decided to go with seven [of the songs recorded in L.A.], with three songs recorded in London.”

Juanita believes that it’s not just Let’s Be Kids that may make people think differently about Howling Bells after hearing the album. She hopes that the band’s old fans will be accepting of the directions that the band are heading in, and the way that they are progressing and ever-so-slightly altering their sound.

“I think it’d be a shame to consistently make the same record. It was very much at the forefront of our minds as a band to take some risks and do something a little different.”

Howling Bells’ Radio Wars is out now through Liberation Music, with the band touring in mid-2009.