On February 23, UK indie outfit The Snuts release their third album Millennials. Having released their first two albums on major label Parlophone, the band decided to launch their own label Happy Artist Records through which to unleash their latest offering. Frontman Jack Cochrane joins Headliner to explain why…
It’s a month to the day until the release of The Snuts’ third record Millennials when we join the band’s frontman Jack Cohrane from his Glasgow home, and he’s very much in album release mode. “It’s busy, man,” he says with a smile. “We have a lot of shows coming up, promo shows at record stores, which are a lot of fun as you get that one-on-one feel with the fans, and you get some good feedback on how the record will be received. We’re about to set off to the States as soon as the record is released, so a lot of rehearsals. The songs get harder to play with every album it seems [laughs] but we can’t wait.”
He's in a buoyant mood, and it’s easy to see why. Last year, the band took the dramatic decision to part ways with major label Parlophone – their home for chart-topping debut W.L. and its Top 3 follow-up Burn The Empire – and launch their own independent label Happy Artist Records in conjunction with music distributor The Orchard to release album number three. As such, it’s an album that was simultaneously liberating and laden with self-imposed pressure.
“It was around this time last year that we realised we’d been noticing a fundamental breakdown in communication with our previous label,” Cochrane says, explaining how the band arrived at their decision to break out on their own. “There were a lot of blurred lines when it came to the direction and the vision of the band and the direction and the vision of the label. We could feel that breakdown right through the making of that record.
“I think it becomes every band’s dream on a major label to take back some of that freedom,” he continues. “So we decided to take it on ourselves and put the ball in our court. It was January 2023 that we started making music together again. We camped up in the highlands in Scotland and it felt like a while since we’d just made music as friends with no pressure to go out and make something.”
For Cochrane, the biggest point of difference between band and label arose from the latter’s insistence on pushing the band’s personality over the music.
“The pressure of what it means to be an artist today is something different to what we signed up to,” says Cochrane. “When we first signed to a label it was very music-driven and now it’s very personality-driven, which is something we felt very uncomfortable with. There was an intensity about how we were supposed to come across as people and that was affecting us as humans. There has always been that friction between band and label.
“I’m not of the mindset that major labels are terrible and can’t work for anyone,” he notes. “We were very lucky and grateful to have the experiences we had and to work with some incredible producers and learn the landscape of what it means to be a recording artist. And to squash a myth, in our case at least, there was never any pressure for us to be anything we didn’t want to be. The guy we worked with there always wanted the best for us musically, so we were happy on that front. But the landscape changed a lot, so there is now a lot of pressure on being a front-facing celebrity, which is something we’ve never been comfortable with. I wanted to be able to keep my privacy and I don’t think that’s an option at major labels now.
“There is such a focus on personality first, then they’ll find your music. That wasn’t something we would accept.”
Despite the upheaval that came with departing a major for a new independent approach, creatively The Snuts had developed considerable momentum in amassing ideas that would come to form Millennials.
