Modern Guilt, a London-based alt-rock band have released their second EP “We’ll Always Have Vegas.” The five-track EP brings you anthemic, addictive, and spirited soundscapes woven together with gritty guitar-driven aesthetic, stylish vocal performances, and moving themes. The songs explore the human tendency to chase pleasure and purpose through the story of a person indulging in the exuberance of Las Vegas. Lost In The Manor interviews Modern Guilt about the themes, musical influences, future plans, and creative processes involved in making the EP “We’ll Always Have Vegas.”
Tell us about yourself. What inspired the name “Modern Guilt’?
Jaz: We wanted a name that could mean a number of different things. Part of it is that the world is full of modern vices for us to dive into and part of it is a great album by Beck.
Your second EP, ‘We’ll Always Have Vegas’, is a sonic triumph. Introduce us to the sounds and stories explored here.
Jaz: The ideas came through a series of different stories, the way we write has worked out as recording small moments, stories or snapshots and we’ve always found that there’s a synchronicity to them that we then compile. So, the sounds are those of this sprawling western adventure of the soul, the lone rider wandering through nights and internal collapse and revelation. The arrangements have been so crucial to the feel of the lyrics.
Describe your creative process? How do you approach songwriting collectively?
Scott: It’s highly collaborative, we sit down together and just start throwing sounds, it almost always starts sonically rather than lyrically as we work out what sounds are working for us on any given day. So, we build the spine of a song and start hinting to ourselves where it might be going. Sometimes this snaps into place in five minutes and sometimes it takes a week or two. Then we send Jaz into a corner to write a story and don’t let him out until it’s done.
What inspired the lyrical themes in the EP?
Jaz: The lyrical themes were all based around a metaphorical mad night out. Vegas is a temple of debauchery and was the perfect setting for a desert sprawling, soul crawling, mirror gazing, 3am revelatory spiritual ayahuasca trip. It’s almost like watching yourself through a lens on the rise and fall on the edge of oblivion.
Name some of the musical influences that have shaped your sound?
The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Springsteen, BRMC, Dandy Warhols, Bob Dylan, Soundtrack of Our Lives, The Hives, Primal Scream, The Strokes, Mazzy Star and it goes on forever and ever!
Is there any track in the EP that was challenging to create and how did you overcome it?
Jaz: A few of them were, HTBH was challenging as it was so layered and we had so many different parts flowing through it, I think we scrapped dozens of ideas of percussion and guitar lines. It was almost deciding what of those musical parts, if they were biographies of people within the story, we wanted to have as we couldn’t fit them all. So, it was about paring back to give definition which was definitely hard for us as so many iterations of it moved in a way that worked for us.
Then ‘Gramophone Remedy’, such a different approach, and a different studio, really pared back, vulnerable - the most obvious lyrically and the most sensitive. It was such a quiet and delicate arrangement that we wanted to frame without dominating. It sits very differently to a lot of our other songs and that’s always nerve wracking as a lyricist and vocalist.
Scott: Yeah, ‘Gramophone Remedy’ was recorded at our producer Mikey Buckley’s home studio. It’s a song in which the vocal really drives and manoeuvres the other parts through the song. It was about finding the right balance of arrangement to compliment the vocal, scrapping parts to leave space in the mix.
What are your future plans and what do you look forward to?
Jaz: The album. It feels we’ve gotten to a stage where we can now say ‘I think we’ve found a sound’. So much of our work together has been about finding out how we are trying to say what we want to say. The lyrics are really only about 10% of that conversation. Bargaining with ourselves and hashing out these sometimes very visual ideas is what’s pushed us to keep evolving and it feels appropriate to mark it with an album.
Really looking forward to playing live, that’s always the most joyous part of this project.
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