Chemical Brothers Push Back the Boundaries
Having released Singles 93-03, does this album feel like a clean slate for you now?
Ed: No, we still feel pretty connected to the music we made before the singles collection; all those things are just random dividers – last year was ten years of our band but it didn’t mean a great deal, it’s a long time to be together. The main thing during the period when we had the singles collection was that a lot of people thought that it was the end of the Chemical Brothers – often it’s seen as a final point, but at the time it was coming out we were working on this record and we were really excited about the music we had under wraps that no one had heard, and we knew that there was something else in the future for us.
How long has this record been in the making?
Tom: “Come With Us” came out in 2002 and we toured that for about a year, then we started in about 2003… so about a year and a half to nearly two years.
What is different about this album?
Tom: When we make a record we don’t want to destroy everything that our band stands for… we’ve done that thing where we’ve got a band with a real sound and feel to all the music that we’ve made, and we want to continue that. We want to make our record and in doing that we want to try new things, and we want to innovate, and we want new sounds and new feelings – that’s part of the thing that’s about being in our band. So every time we make a record there’s that pressure to make something fresh, and I really felt it with this album, we wanted to feel that the record felt invigorating… new and fresh… different. That was the pressure on us to make this record. I think it did help putting out the singles compilation because it made us think about the music we’ve made, we’re intensely proud of the music we’ve made, and we love it… and it really was a spur to make this record… the defining Chemical Brothers record.
So it’s almost a bit of a curse that you’ve been so inventive of new music…
Tom: It’s not really a curse… we just had the feeling that we wanted to be as excited about the music now as when we started making music… And to have that sort of ambition on the fifth album and still feel it as keenly is a good thing. It is a good reason to make music, and it’s what makes us go into the studio every day – to try and do that.
Take us through the tracks off the forthcoming album Galvanize: Is this to be taken as ‘to excite’ or as ‘to coat steel with zinc’?!
(Tom and Ed Laugh)… Ed: Both! Well, it’s a call to arms and a definite starting point for an album. We went to New York and hooked up with Q-Tip, and I think ‘Galvanize’ was just something he said in passing when he was in the booth, and we liked the word… we were excited by the word and he said it a lot. So he wrote a rap around it, about a call to arms at a party.
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The Brothers Gonna Work It Out...
