News Track By Track: Temples - Sun Structures

The first of our Class of 2014 have turned in their homework early: Temples start the year by unveiling their psychedelic debut ‘Sun Structures’ this month. Guitarist James Bagshaw gives a little extra insight into each of its twelve tracks.

Read the DIY Weekly cover feature with Temples.

Shelter Song
‘Shelter Song’ was the first song that we wrote as Temples, and I guess it just stemmed from our love of twelve-string guitars. I guess, in that song - especially in retrospect - we found a sound that we wanted to carry on with. That spurred us on to write the rest of the record, so that’s why we put it first: it’s where we started.



Sun Structures
‘Sun Structures’ basically started with the flute line that comes in on the intro. I was working on a bit of a classical sounding thing, with some weird clashing of notes, and stumbled across that. We wanted it to be very hypnotic and thumping.

The Golden Throne
‘The Golden Throne’ was one of the songs we wrote just after ‘Shelter Song’. I’ve got one of the first ever synthesisers lying about at home, and I wanted to get it on a track. The riff for this song was originally on the guitar but it works really well with the synth doubling it up, so we went with that. It gives it that edge.

Keep In The Dark
With ‘Keep In The Dark’, I remember Tom [Warmsley, bass] bringing round a demo that he had recorded, just on his laptop. I remember instantly liking it, and liking the sentiment of the lyrics. We wanted it to have that stomp to the verses, so it made it feel like the song almost moves really urgently and pushed you along.



Mesmerise
‘Mesmerise’ is one of the most recent songs actually. It was probably only finished two months before we finished the whole record. This one stemmed from having the riff on guitar, but I guess we tried to make the guitar not really sound like a guitar; make it sound a bit more processed and a bit more synthetic.

Move With The Season
This track was my favourite to write and record. It shows a different side to us, as it’s probably the slowest track on the record. This one just started with the melody. I remember, just on my phone, having this melody but I didn’t have a guitar or anything to hand, so I just sang into my phone, and worked out chords around it. The outro is my favourite bit.

Colours To Life
‘Colours To Life’ is once again on a twelve-string guitar. I always wanted to try putting a capo on the guitar, to make the twelve-string shine even more just because you get that really high ringing. This track stemmed, similarly to ‘Shelter Song’, from a riff we were building around. The chorus was originally a verse idea that was just knocking about.



A Question Isn’t Answered
I’ve always liked the idea of starting a song with something that, straight away, tells you what song it is. Starting the song with claps, but in a different time signature to any of the other songs on the record, felt like it would really work as a song between songs. The repetition is hypnotic.

The Guesser
‘The Guesser’ was born at a similar time to ‘Shelter Song’, and it started literally from having a drumbeat and looping it. Underneath the whole song, the loop just carries on and carries on. From the early recordings, we wanted to pay homage to that. The chorus really throws you off and we like stuff like that. We never want to be predictable.

Test Of Time
We were getting really into Brian Eno, and we had the melody and the verse, but we were stuck with the guitar sound. There’s some great guitar work on Eno’s stuff; that kind of, very compressed, fuzzy guitar with not much definition. I guess we wanted to recreate that. It was one of the hardest ones to sit right with us, but we to there in the end.

Sand Dance
Once again Tom brought a riff around which was a very unusual guitar riff. This one for me glued together a lot of our influences, but I feel like this song was one of the easiest to work out, even though it only started as a riff. Everything came quite organically. On the chorus, we had a lot of fun playing with our old gear, and recording some stuff on tape.

Fragment’s Light
‘Fragment’s Light’ has a kind of renaissance-era of music flavour to it. Early on, we tried harpsichord but it sounded too forced. We went back to guitars and knew instantly with this track that we didn’t want any drums. We wanted it to be a very eerie song that leads you off the album in a very subtle way, but leaves you thinking.



Temples’ debut album ‘Sun Structures’ is out now on Heavenly Recordings.