Ahead of the release of their new album, Charlie Richardson caught up with Ali Graves, lead guitarist with Newcastle punk outfit, Death to Indie.
So, tell us about your upcoming album?
This album was created with the sort of new line-up for the band, so this album is noticeably heavier than the last stuff – you can definitely tell that my influences are coming in. My background is Alice Cooper, The Wildhearts, Wednesday 13 and very much the heavier end of the rock spectrum in comparison with the other lads; it wouldn’t be unusual to find me listening to Machine Head just to relax! You can hear some influences from The Manic Street Preachers and we’ve added some more variation in the backing vocals: Jax was doing most of the backing before but we’ve all added backing vocals to the album and that changes the sound from how it was before.
Where did you record it?
We recorded it in NEMIX in Newcastle. A lot of the songs we had been kicking around for quite a while. It was the first time I had recorded for a long time, properly, so that was a nice change. And it was a pretty painless escapade really – although there has been a bit of a delay getting the album out.
When can we hear it?
The first single comes out on the 9th August (‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’) and this track is sort of a semi-political one, particularly apt with everything that’s been going on the last three years in this country and over in the states. It’s a good catchy punky-poppy sort of number. Then the rest of the album should be out around the 30th August.
What’s next for Death to Indie?
We have a gig with a couple of other bands coming up on the 6th August and then we concentrate on the single, video and album coming out. We are working with another drummer at the minute just to try and keep Ricky covered as he’s having some health issues at the moment – I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that.
So, we are keeping it a bit quiet at the minute until the album is out and then we’ll be really pushing it into September. We’ve already got some new songs kicking about: because this album has taken so long, we were almost calling it ‘Chinese Democracy version 2.0’! Apart from that, we are playing Badlands Festival on 6th September down in Lincoln. We got that gig off the back of the Battle of the Bands for Call of the Wild Festival earlier in the year. All in all, we are looking forward to gigging more and getting back in the studio.
To keep up-to-date with Death to Indie, head to Facebook.com/deathtoindie.
