News Track By Track: Blood Red Shoes - Blood Red Shoes

Across their assured, almighty self-titled return, Blood Red Shoes do their best to defy convention and throw a whole load of ‘fuck you”s at standard musical norms. That’s the intention, as Steven Ansell clearly states in a track-by-track guide to the new album. The DIY Weekly coverstars haven’t necessarily re-invented themselves on this release, but a trip to Berlin and an exposure to this brilliant city allowed them to go up yet another gear. Listen below.



Welcome Home
It seems like everyone these days wants to have a big, atmospheric tension-building intro to their album à la The Stone Roses. This is our ‘fuck you’ to that idea. It’s an instrumental opening to the album which is totally all-out guitar warfare in a very short space of time.

Everything All At Once
To me this is like a really sped up version of a Led Zep kind of groove, like ‘Immigrant Song’ but played too fucking fast and with all the guitars in the red. It’s about living in the moment, not being calculated or considered or worrying too much about the future but just fucking going for it. That sums up our approach to the whole of this album.

An Animal
This is one of those songs that felt like it’d just fallen out of the sky, Laura bought this trash guitar off eBay and the first thing that happened when she plugged it in was this song. Just came out. I tried a few drum patterns because it’s actually a weird timing where the riff goes 3 - 3 - 5 then repeats, and I liked the idea of playing something kinda like Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’, which was recorded in Berlin. Plus the simplicity of that beat over the guitar riff somehow means you have a polyrhythm you can dance to, which sounds like a ridiculous over-analysis of what is just a fucking rock’n’roll song, but it’s true.

Grey Smoke
For some reason the album is full of smoke references and neither of us know why, or even realized until after it was finished. That happens a lot, because we work very instinctively so we’re not always aware of what we’re actually doing. We’re just feeling our way in the dark. It’s probably got the most swagger of any song we’ve recorded, plus it has a total anti-solo in it, something which Laura’s done a fair bit of on this album. This is definitely our most guitar-centric album, which is saying something for us.

Far Away
It’s very rare that we write lyrics from a character perspective - we usually write in the first person or just write stream-of-consciousness style and see what comes out. This song is very different. To me it’s like a tale of a boy and girl who wake up in the middle of the night, steal the parents’ car and run away just for the hell of it. It’s quite romantic, but not in a cliché love-song style.

The Perfect Mess
We chose to release this as the first single from the album because we thought it represented where we’re at. It’s a pop song but it’s really fucking distorted and aggressive, has some weird twists and turns in the structure and it has alternating vocals between both singers. In that sense it’s classic Blood Red Shoes, really. I don’t think it could have been made by any other band than us.

Behind A Wall
This is lyrically very much influenced by the surroundings in Berlin, early when we were writing the album when it was really fucking cold and dark and snowy. Actually, we had the lyrics way before we had the music for it. We only finished this one really really late in the game, and we switched the vocal at the last minute to Laura-Mary singing it and not me.

Stranger
This song reminds me of what we were trying to achieve on ‘In Time To Voices’. It’s not a guitar-centered song. It’s driven by a keyboard and vocal line. It’s much more atmospheric and slower building, plus it has more layers and detail than a lot of the rest of the album.

Speech Coma
I barely even remember writing this song musically. I think we just jammed it after a night out. The lyrics are dealing with themes of not being able to communicate, either because of your own limitations but also those imposed upon you, whether that be a government silencing its people or a personal relationship where you can’t speak your mind.

Don’t Get Caught
I had a dream last night that I was in jail for a crime that I never even committed. This song is about keeping things close so you never end up in jail. My favourite memory of this song is when Laura was recording the guitar solo. I mean, obviously we hate guitar solos but we wanted to capture the right amount of ‘fuck guitar solos’ in the solo. Took a while but I think we got it.

Cigarettes In The Dark
We had quite a lot of songs we were messing with which were based on hip-hop grooves, but not many of those jams made the album, we ended up choosing the faster more aggressive songs. This is one that made the cut, we got some friends in to do the R&B style handclaps on it and recorded the guitars with mics in the corners of the room to capture the concrete spaciousness of the East Berlin building we were in.

Tightwire
The first day we loaded all our gear into this room in Krezuberg, Laura-Mary sat down at the piano and wrote the chords to this. For us it had to be on the album because it was a sign that we’d come to the right place and we’d be having a really creative spell, which we did. Again it reminds me of something more like what we did on the 3rd album, in that it’s not driven by guitars, but it has the toughness and edginess of this 4th album stamped all over it.