Album guide Track by Track: We Were Promised Jetpacks - Unravelling

This was one of the first tracks that we wrote for the new album way back at the start of 2013 and was also one of the songs that took the longest to complete. I remember Adam originally writing a version of it on garageband on his laptop and bringing it to us. It was centred around a single piano melody (which is still present in the album version only now it’s played on guitar) which lead big brass section. The basics are still there to be heard but we spent a lot of time working on each individual section of the song to maximise it’s potential. The synth intro was actually the very last thing we wrote and recorded on the whole album. We knew it needed something to make it stand out from the rest of our songs and after spending a whole day stitching together lots of different synth sounds it became clear that it would be the opening track on the album. I’d say it’s most poppy song on ‘Unravelling’. (Darren)

This probably had the smoothest writing and recording process of all the songs. I think the bass and the drums lock in perfectly. Once we nailed that down, we knew it was what really drove the song along. It was great listening to it get recorded in the studio, each track we put down just seemed to make it more lush and dynamic. When we demo’d the album, we had some weak-ass ending that faded out. We quickly got rid of that and just made the ending heavier. Why not eh? (Stuart)

I think we all feel that this song was and is really important to us. It was the first one we chose to mix as it was the one that we were all really eager to hear and we felt if we nailed this one we’d have more of an idea of how we would mix the rest. We were in the studio this time whilst it was getting mixed, which was a first for us, and it was great being able to be there to communicate exactly what we felt it needed. Sometimes even the smallest of tweaks make such a big difference and its tough trying to communicate that through emails or phone calls to a person mixing it miles away.

This song was incredibly frustrating to write but that is perhaps why it felt so rewarding when we listened to the finished mix. As with a lot of our songs we jammed this one out for ages at a time and the part that we thought was the good bit has ended up being completely cut out. I think it sums up the album perfectly as the song is more considered than some of our previous work and has more space and groove to it, which definitely was the aim of this album.

It’s a song about being paranoid and that feeling that everything is delicately balanced and if one thing changes you might crumble apart and you’re afraid to go back where you were. Keep it composed, keep it together. (Adam)

This was the first song to be completed that made it onto the album. We’ve actually been playing it for close to three years now in our live set so feels pretty old to us. We did a similar thing with our last album too. We wrote Boy in the Backseat long before we wrote the rest of the album. Similarly, Peace Sign was finished not long after recording our second album and we didn’t write anymore for a good while after that. I guess this song is perhaps the one we were most prepared to record having played it live for so long. However, we did shake things up a bit in a few sections as Paul Savage thought we could make the parts without vocals a little more melodic and interesting. My much better half wrote one of the verses in this song which makes it really nice for me. It’s a song about compromising and looking after each other and not just thinking about yourself. (Adam)

We had the main body of the song for a long time but for some reason we couldn’t quite take him over the finish line. A good bit of pre-production with Paul helped bring out the chorus’ then a last minute change in vocal melody made all the difference. I like the space in this song. Creating space was something we were very conscious of when we were writing. It opens up when it needs to then it locks right in again. This is my favourite new song to play live. No-nonsense drums, phat bass, happy days. (Sean)

This was a really fun one to write. It started as a jam in the practice room and we just played it over and over for about 15 minutes. Then we had a big talk about how we were going to structure it. The song had a brief spell where it got a bit louder, but before long we decided to really hold back and let all of the parts breathe. This is a song where we put the drums through a Space Echo in the studio. One of the old Space Echo machines that uses tape. We used that quite a lot. Anyway, we all love how this song has come together. I think it’s our most confident song yet. (Michael)

Bright Minds originally started as a completely different sounding song all together. It was a far slower, lazy rock song that didn’t really seem to go anywhere. After demoing it and listening back we all decided that it needed a new lease of life, it needed massive changes. We were in our practice room mulling it over and I started playing a sort of hip-hop type beat that everyone started playing along to. The song just came naturally to us after that. It was a complete departure from anything we’ve written before so I’d say it was one of the most enjoyable to write and it’s definitely the closest to rapping you’ll ever hear from us! Once we took it to the pre-production stage with Paul Savage he pushed us to structure it slightly different, to create more of a verse-chorus-verse-chorus style as oppose to completely different sections one after the other as we had it. We chose to make the ending a sort of chaotic, mish-mash of different guitar sounds and percussion to contrast the rest of the song. (Darren)

I think we all knew when we were writing this that it was going to be a single contender. It’s going to be our second single after I Keep It Composed. I’m also pretty sure that it’s our only song with a bit in 3/4 time! How’s that’s for a fact? We had a great time in the studio with the middle/build up section layering percussion and guitars, making sure everything built just so. It’s the song that I think we did the least tinkering with as we were writing. But in the studio we gave each sound a lot of attention. (Michael)

Peter was going to go see Local Natives, so Adam done his favourite impression of them to cheer him up. It wasn’t quite the right chords but once we all started playing along, it became this whole different thing, and this pretty much became the big part at the end. We didn’t want that to be some sort of chorus that kept repeating, so we tried to build up a song with a lot if tension so when it came to that part, we tore it up. (Stuart)

This song wasn’t written with the intentions of being a WWPJ song, it’s just the type of thing I play when I’m sitting on my tod. After an encouraging kick up the arse from my girlfriend I pieced together the three main bass parts of the song and took it to the tiny WWPJ rehearsal room. The rest of the guys put all the good stuff on top, fairly easily if I remember correctly. We took the unfinished article in to the studio and played it live to Paul a couple of times. We changed the structure quite a bit then started recording. Paul put some lovely touches on it. The chorus effect on my bass from the space echo and I really like the huge reverb on the snare for the last section. He tentatively suggested a big, ridiculous 80s sounding snare, so we tried it and now I love it. We got the title from a list of potential album/track names that ran with the theme of the album. (Sean)

This song wasn’t really written in our typical way. It only really came together in the studio as we hadn’t worked on it as a band before heading into Chem19. It started as an acoustic guitar song but I popped it onto a piano in GarageBand and started messing about with it. We ended up just using some of those sounds underneath the live piano that Stuart plays on the finished track. The drums were recorded along to a click-track without Darren being able to hear the song so we had lots of different types of live drums to work with, as well as deciding to experiment with electronic drums. We then cut and copied and pasted the drums and other sounds for a while in order to piece together the song. This was one song that we revisited the studio to sort out as the first draft of it wasn’t quite right. I’m delighted that we chose to work on it again as it wasn’t really a contender to make it onto the album but once we finished it properly we felt it was interesting enough to make the cut. (Adam)

We Were Promised Jetpacks’ new album ‘Unravelling’ will be released on 6th October.

Tags: We Were Promised Jetpacks, Listen, Features