The album was recorded in November 2018 at Ballintubbert House, Ireland - where better to accommodate Girl Band’s unsettling sound than a manor house? The alien construction of Ballintubbert and its corridors helped to navigate Girl Band's cataclysmic sound. The Talkies knowingly deals with the phenomenon of sound, the artistic blast upon the senses as artistic communication becomes sensory rather than cognitive.
Lyrically, the language on the record is decontextualised, allowing it to rock seamlessly between the absurd and the every day, creating new forms of meaning and emotion. “The songs, for us, can be up to interpretation. It’s rarely about specific ideas and more about the process of dovetailing lyrics to fit the music.” And so it is not meaning, but the physical weight of sound that brings these lyrics into existence.
“In many ways the idea behind the album was to make an audio representation of the house. We recorded all the drums twice: once on the landing and once in the cellar, and during production we could actually cut in between both these sounds. After we cancelled the last tour we weren’t really writing together as much anymore so we were more into demoing and writing down parts then cutting them up, collaging them together in the computer and reconfiguring them that way”.
Release: September 27th, 2019, Rough Trade/Remote Control
Words: Rough Trade