News The Kill Van Kulls: ‘Our Album Could Be Quite Biblical’

The Kill Van Kulls have already been likened to OMD, Prince and Simple Minds but the Mancunian four-piece is more than a nostalgia band. Chris Moyles, the NME and even we have been impressed by their anthemic pop. Lead vocalist Gareth Bartlett notes the importance of being ambitious at this stage, claiming, “You’re going to see us develop more and there’s a grandness that comes with that. We’ve had to be ambitious because we wouldn’t have done this otherwise. Certain small venues in Manchester are great, but we don’t want to play them forever. We want to move on to bigger places.”

The magic all happens in their Stockport recording studio where they’ve blanketed their debut album with tender loving care, “It has three separate recording booths for experimentation and it’s totally in our control.” Gareth goes on about how total control is important to the band, claiming, “Someone’s not going to take as much care with someone else’s car as he would his own. You know what to bring out of it if you’ve got the love and passion, whereas it’s just another job to other people. I don’t think it would have been the same set of recordings if we did it with someone else, but that doesn’t mean I’ll rule out working with someone else in the future.”

A degree of certainty would be required if an outsider were to come in. Guitarist Chris Milton stresses, “If they have an agenda and can add loads in, that’s something we’d like the sound of because we can try to emulate that sound and turn it into our own.” Gareth adds, “I guess the question is whether we’d work quicker with a producer. You’ve got to go into a room and you’ve got to know what you want to sound like. We’ve spent hours talking about the album, but end to end, we want it all to be a fluid piece. This will go out, and fingers crossed, people will see that we produced this with a lot of love and care and hopefully they’ll realise the strength of the songs.”

This ‘fluid piece’ is still in its infancy but the smallest of births can grow into the grandest of products. “I’m not expecting Abbey Road but it would be nice to craft a sound that’s our own. There are going to be times which could be quite biblical. It’s going to be a journey where you’ll get quality pop tunes like ‘Lost and Found’ which is where we’ve tried to mature,” Gareth explains.

Despite this grand vision, Chris tells us that the record will be quite strip backed, “The songs that work the best are the ones where there’s not so much going off.” Explaining the song writing process, Gareth says, “I wouldn’t describe it as a strip backed album but there’s logic with the instrumentation. I know we’ll have samples and synths on there, because it’s one of our major influences, but we’ll be very care with adding lots of different layers.” He reveals how this is the result of the band’s own mistakes. “It’s a common mistake we’ve realised. You reach a fine line which you soon step over and can’t get back. There were times where I’ve looked at a song and thought, ‘I’ll just take that off and I can get back to where I started.’ It doesn’t work like that and it’s been a real learning curve to simplify and only have what’s good for a song rather than smothering it.”

Throughout the writing process, Chris implies how unlikely influences have shaped their debut, “Our drummer Ben went back to one of our previous singles ‘Fools Wish’ and completely redid so it now has a dance feel like David Guetta’s ‘Titanium.’ I wouldn’t normally listen to that song but it sounds awesome.”

Gareth agrees that these influences are important. “Robyn’s on the radio in Sweden all the time and I was listening to two particular tracks. One had no hi hats and another used synths to recreate them. It’s only when you listen and start being courteous to music that you realise their importance and start to learn from it. On a plane home from Stockholm, I listened to this real old Fleetwood Mac track and the recording was unbelievable. All these things influenced the album.” Chris adds, “All our songs are quite in the moment of our influences and there’s a different spectrum of what we like.”

Rather than fixate tirelessly on recording, the band have been constantly evolving live too. Weeks prior to this interview, the band played a slot at HMV’s Next Big Thing which, as Gareth describes, “was a big learning curve. You’ve definitely got to make people think they want to get on stage with you. We’ve never been a band that’s pushed ourselves with the audience and now it’s time to think about that more. When people pay for shows, they want to be entertained, just as we want to be entertained when we see someone else.” Referring back to their rehearsal space, he says, “It’s good to have our space in Stockport to practise as a live band because we want to better ourselves that way. We’ve evolved in some senses but we’ve still got a long way to go. If we keep evolving, we can survive.”



The Kill Van Kulls’ new EP ‘Songs For Sinners’ will be released on 23rd April.