The Drums

Tue 3rd Jan, 2012 in Features

The Drums broke onto the music scene with their acclaimed Summertime EP in 2010. A promising debut ensued, and barely a year after its released the band followed up with Portamento, a more personal affair of solemn-pop. Frontman Jonathan Pierce is in a pensive mood as he chats to FL about inner-band tensions, getting away from that ‘surf band’ tag, and dropping the song that helped them hit the big time.

Hello Jonathan, where are you at the moment?
I’m doing well, doing well in Barcelona. Not too nice for some reason. It’s cold and I’m next to a dark, stormy ocean. I was looking forward to kind of the opposite to the all of this, but oh well, that’s just life. We have a show tomorrow; it’s the first show of our month long European tour.

Jacob stated in a recent interview that The Drums could fall apart at any minute as that is the nature of the band. What are your thoughts on the longevity of the band? What are the reasons for such a mentality?
We’re not a band to do a lot of planning, and I don’t think we did a lot of planning before we jumped into this. We didn’t do a lot of planning before we released the first album, we didn’t do any planning before we started recording Portamento and released that. And I think, maybe, we’re a little bit reckless. I think we are sort of the type to dig our own graves, almost on a daily basis [laughs]. Whether it’s turning down opportunities other bands would never turn down or jumping into…you know we jumped into Portamento, and we just wanted to release the album as soon as it was done. We didn’t really think that through, realising ‘oh wait we have to tour and support the album’ which means another two years of touring [laughs with traces of fading sanity].

So it’s that sort of thing where we dive head first into these situations and sometimes it just gets a little tough. But, I will go on the record and say that right now things seem much better within this band and we seem to be getting along and being creative together and brainstorming and stuff. It’s been a little while since that’s happened. With Portamento we sort of got together and recorded it, but there wasn’t much hanging out, which I think was really great for the album. I think it added a texture to it that may not have been there if everything was hunky dory. I’ve always been one to welcome drama within a band or within a family and just life in general. I can’t relate to people who just breeze through life. I sort of need that friction and I think music needs that sort of friction. I think we half let ourselves get into trouble like that and I think it’s because we know good things can come from it, and if anything it just saves us from boredom.

What would you say is the main difference between Portamento and your debut?
I think everything up until Portamento, except for a small handful of songs, was sort of cinematically driven or something like that. Everything seems sort of escapist. With Portamento we were done with all that, we had toured for two years. We felt like our feet were finally hitting the ground, and life wasn’t quite as surreal or exotic anymore. Things just got much more serious, as individuals and as a band. It just felt like it was time to make a really blunt, honest album, and so we did that. Portamento, to me, in a way, sort of feels like another debut album.

Had we known the whole world would hear that first album… you know we recorded most of that album the same time we record the Summertime EP, so it was kind of all done at the same time and we didn’t think anyone would ever hear any of it, and then the whole world sort of did. I think had we known that it would of received such a wide audience maybe we would of taken a little bit more time and been a bit more honest.
Portamento is our chance, knowing that people are going to hear it, and were wondering what we were up to. It was our chance to dig deeper into what this band is, and what we want to say. I wonder if we had known that people would be hearing that first album if we wouldn’t have made some changes to it.

I’m really excited about Portamento. It’s just nice to have something that feels very real. There’s some songs from our past that I think we’ve outgrown as a band and the words feel kind of empty at this point and so we’re trying to weed those out. I think our live show suffers from songs that don’t feel sincere to us anymore. They felt sincere at the time but now they just don’t. Our show has greatly improved just by putting in these new songs that I think we’ll be able to sing until we are done being a band, and they won’t lose any relevance for us.