On March 18, Feeder release their 11th studio album in the form of Torpedo, a brand new collection of songs that spans the sonic extremities of their unique brand of hook-laden rock. Frontman and songwriter Grant Nicholas speaks to Headliner about producing the new record and how the band has been able to so successfully navigate the choppy waters of the music industry for almost 30 years.
Torpedo, the follow-up to 2019’s Tallullah, the band’s most commercially successful record since 2002’s Comfort in Sound, is in many ways a very different beast to its predecessor, not least because it was written during lockdown. The album exhibits some of the band’s heaviest moments in years, while also offering intimate glimpses of Feeder at their most fragile.
Despite the fact that the record was written and recorded largely during the most stringent social distancing measures, the remote collaboration between Nicholas and fellow Feeder co-founder and bassist Taka Hirose during this time was far from a new concept, with each living at opposite ends of the country and being well-versed in the art of remote sessions.
To find out more about Torpedo and, as Nicholas elaborates throughout our conversation, its already written follow-up, we join him via Zoom at his North London home for a chat about the past, present and future of Feeder…
When did this new record first start to take shape?
Pre-lockdown we were looking forward to the second half of our Tallullah tour. The album did really well, as did the first half of the tour, but the second half was cancelled due to Covid. So we went into lockdown, but before that I did a bunch of writing and we did some recording. I sent some tracks to Taka and he put some bass on, so we had an album’s worth of stuff pre-Covid. Then it all came to a grinding halt and those songs were just left there, and we were doing what everybody else did, which was just staying at home doing very little. After a couple of months, doing a bit of gardening and all the jobs I’d been putting off for years, I just started writing again, so this album is really what I wrote during that time. And all the pre-Covid songs haven’t been used, so they will be on the next record. It’s all a bit back to front.
How did you manage to record these songs during lockdown?
I have a small studio at home where I do most of the Feeder stuff. Taka lives up north so I’ve hardly seen him through Covid, and he has a little set up so I can send him ideas for guide bass, then he’ll do his thing and send it back. That’s how we did the record. And we did a bit of that on the last album because these days that’s how records are made. The days of going off to California and spending £250,000, unless you’re a huge, huge artists, don’t happen very often. I wouldn’t say no to it! But I have the studio here, which is where we do guitars. We can’t do drums here so we managed to find times where we could get into studios to record them. But otherwise, it was all done here.
The songs just poured out of me and they had a slightly different vibe to the songs I’d written before lockdown, so I didn’t want to dilute it by just putting a few of those on this album. We really kept it focused and had this old school album approach and a lot of thought has gone into the track list and the artwork.
At first it was going to be a mini album for the fanbase, it wasn’t even going to be released properly. But I played it to some people and it got a great reaction, so we decided to put it out as a standalone record. It’s gone from being a mini album to, ‘OK, let’s make it a double album with all the pre-Covid songs’, and then we just thought it was too much. So, hopefully the next album will be out this time next year, but it’ll be those pre-Covid songs plus a few new ones I’ve just written. But they are very much connected, these albums. It’s the same artist doing the artwork for each.
Did you intend to explore the various strands of Feeder’s sound with this album from the outset?
The heavy and light dynamic is kind of a Feeder trademark. Even going back to our early work there has always been an acoustic track or songs with strings. I think it’s important to sequence it in a way so that it takes you back and forth between our different dynamics