THE WOMBATS IN THE STUDIO - NME ARTICLE | Comments :

21/01/2009 by WOMBATS

Your first album was all about getting slapped at discos, chasing girls around the school playground and, of course, dancing to Ian Curtis and co. So surely your second album has to start exploring more adult, dare we say, mature themes?

Not if you're The Wombats. The Liverpool-based three-piece are keen to keep away from the usual grown-up second album route when they unleash the follow-up to 'A Guide To Love, Loss & Desperation', hopefully in the latter half of 2009.

"Because the first album is kind of carefree, and it ended up with a hands-in-the-air party vibe, we don't want to do the 'mature second album'," explains frontman Matthew 'Murph' Murphy. "We just saw a press release that said 'The Wombats are growing up' - I'd rather grow backwards!

"One thing we can say is that we feel that we want to develop our sound as it is now, we're not gonna go and do an Irish folk record or do an electro record. We feel we can still develop the sound of a guitar, a bass and drums more."

He adds that is "would be a bit weird for us to come back with a second album that was a concept album with no hits on it whatsoever - we all love pop music so much anyway!"

However, Murph says that the record will explore some strange, slightly morbid, new topics.

"Some of the stuff we've been doing is slightly darker, probably more lyrically," he says. "We've got one song called 'How To Pack Your Bags And Leave', it's probably a bit more riffy and a bit heavier and the start of it is slightly different to anything we've done before. Dan plays a harmonica on it - it almost sounds slightly country!"

The band also recorded another song, currently untitled, which ploughs a similar, darker furrow. "It's about my dead grandmother," says Murph. "It's really riffy, it's still got a hint of carefree stuff, but definitely the middle of it does get pretty menacing and emotional."

Before the new album, though, there's a new single, 'My Circuitboard City', which will be released in February - although the band aren't yet sure whether it will be included on the album or will sit as a standalone single.

"Whatever the album's like," says drummer Dan Haggis, "we're going to be touring it for a good year minimum, so until we're totally happy with it... You can't go into a tour lightly, we need to be like, 'This is the album we want to put out and these are the songs we want to play for a year.' We're not going to rush just for the sake of it."

"We'll go into the studio when we're happy with everything," agrees Murph. "We don't want to tie ourselves down to a date."