Red Riders

Thu 25th Jun, 2009 in Features

From their earliest days, Red Riders seemed destined to be a band that made people take notice. Before they’d even released their debut EP, there was a buzz around the Sydney band.

It came as no surprise that their debut album Replica Replica fulfilled the promise that the band showed early on. They delivered a great collection of tunes lead by the stellar single Slide In Next To Me, and backed up by the cracking My Love Is Stronger Than Your Love and Crawl Back Baby. Now Red Riders are entering a different phase of their career: following on from their debut with a second release, Drown In Colour. It’s a release that, according to now lone frontman Alex Grigg, almost didn’t happen.

“We had to make a decision about what we were going to do,” he says of the Red Riders’ future in the lead-up to writing and recording Drown In Colour. “We listened to the songs we demoed and really liked them, and then decided we really wanted people to hear these songs.”

With fellow guitarist/vocalist Adrian Duetsch leaving the four-piece, the burden fell upon Alex to deliver the goods – but he’s determined not to be stressed by any expectations. “I just want to enjoy it for what it is,” he asserts.

Initially the plan was for Drown In Colour to be recorded as a three-piece, but before they knew it, they were including the Vines’ bassist Brad Heald in on their plans. “He was, or is, playing bass in the Vines,” Alex says coyly, “and it’s a whole new energy to the band. It was a really different experience. Me and Matt and Tom spent a lot of time, just the three of us, working on songs. It got to the point where we got really sick…not really sick of each other, but it was becoming really hard. Obviously we were in the rehearsal studio and it felt like something was missing, some musical layer or whatever. It didn’t feel right.

“We all went away,” he continues, “and just took a couple of months off. When we all came back we had to make a decision of what we were going to do. A couple of months out before the recording, Brad joined the band. It was when the Vines hit a rocky patch, and I texted him just to make sure that everything was cool. It turns out he plays guitar as well, so he came down and it gelled straight away.”

Alex believes that Brad’s sudden addition to the band added something to the sound of Drown In Colour and Red Riders as a whole – a certain spontaneity, and a point of difference between their new album and their debut. “We’d been playing those songs, together, for so long,” he says of Replica Replica, “and every part was written, everything was really in place.

“Whereas for this one Drown In Colour, the rhythm tracks were pretty in place and good, but the stuff on top was unwritten. So much of it happened spontaneously in the studio. I think that lends it this sort of energy. I think a lot of the time when you’re in the studio you hope for some magic; those moments are really what you hope for. On this record there are quite a lot of those moments.”

Where Replica Replica had something of a high-gloss sheen to it, with disco hi-hats finding their way onto songs such as Slide In Next to Me, Drown In Colour is a lot more of a rough – œn ready record. “That was something that we wanted to do as well,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s as tight and as snappy as Replica Replica, but I wouldn’t say that it’s more lo-fi. It’s not as much of a tight, intensively-rhythmic, but I feel that that it does have its own…sheen, I guess.”

There’s certainly more of a pronounced influence of the Cure this time around. “Oh, really? Maybe,” he wavers. “I’m always pretty aware of the influence of the Cure on our stuff, so I felt like the last record had a fair few nods to the Cure as well – A.S.P.I.R.I.N. and My Love is Stronger Than Your Love to a degree as well. On this one Over Again is pretty Cure-y as well. They’ve always been an influence, particularly on me I think. The rest of the band, not so much, but as the main songwriter it’s going to come through.”

Red Riders’ Drown In Colour is 10 July through Ivy League.