Lippy Interviews: Drenge
by Abi Whistance
With the release of their new album Strange Creatures inciting a change in genre for the indie-rock two-piece, Lippy decided to sit down with Drenge and chat all things electro, upcoming tours and, of course, the new record.
So Strange Creatures has just dropped, how are you feeling about it?
'We’re feeling good, luckily we’re not sick of it yet! It’s a bit different from our usual stuff and that definitely wasn’t an accident.'
It is quite different, anything changed in the process that made it so?
‘We used a computer for once and that changed our world view, instead of doing it on little pieces of paper like we’re used to and losing scraps wondering ‘where’s that song we wrote a few weeks ago gone?’. If you have it all on a computer you can do interesting stuff with it when you can see everything more clearly, it helps us cut and copy and loop stuff too. Like for example This Dance off the album, I wouldn’t normally think of writing something like that but with a computer it just seemed like it would be easy to record it and loop it and get on with the bits I wanted to do.’
The album is a little bit more techno than we’ve seen before with Drenge, how has that been received so far?
‘Well, my Mum and Dad like it. I got a text from my Mum telling me it’s good so I guess that’s a good sign. I think it seems to have gone down well; it’s always interesting putting something out then hearing the conversation around it afterwards, it’s way more interesting than any reviews you get. But we’ve read some really interesting articles about it and people can’t seem to decide what track is their favourite, and that for me is a job well done- not everything on the album might be for everyone but it seems to appeal to a lot of different people. People don’t even listen to albums anymore, so if they like a track and it means something to them then that’s still good for us.’
In terms of influences for the album or for Drenge in general, is there anyone you’ve been inspired by?
‘It would be a bit weird to say there’s one artist or band that informed the entire album, we listen to a lot of stuff and try to bring in multiple influences really. We’ve seen HMLTD a couple of times and they’re really good, and I really liked the poppy-rock album The Wild Beasts put out a while ago. I think that came out when I started to work on this record and I really liked how they’d matched synth and guitars, there’s a lot of things about that record that I really enjoyed.’
You’ve got a string of gigs that you’re playing in support of the new album, what are your plans after that point?
‘We’ve got a couple of festivals I think? My Dad text me to see if we’re free for a cricket match- to go to not to play obviously. We’re not playing any cricket pitches any time soon. I need to text him back actually. But yeah we’ve got a few things in line.’
For details of the upcoming tour, click here.