News Track By Track: Tripwires - Spacehopper

Reading-based psych-expansionists Tripwires cram just about every wild-eyed idea in sight straight into their debut album ‘Spacehopper’. Landing a release on Frenchkiss Records (Bloc Party, Les Savy Fav), you’ve Rhys Edwards’ snarling vocals placed at the top of the mix, but the surrounding furore ranges from all-out frenzied (‘Plasticine’) to more glistening and strung-out backings (‘Paint’). We’re thrilled to have an exclusive stream of the group’s debut, alongside the following track-by-track guide, kindly provided by those handsome chaps above, with their wonderful taste in music (and jumpers).

Spacehopper
When we first started working on this song we decided quite early on that this would be nice way to open a record. It’s had quite a few different versions, but all have that funny space-film soundtrack feel. Just before recording this final version we completely deconstructed it back down to just the whale-music sounding guitar part and built it up again from scratch. We had a lot of fun making all the sounds for this song, and like how it sounds like a space rocket taking off from underwater.

Plasticine
In terms of how many different sounds are on this track, this is the most condensed song we’ve ever written. It’s a pop song about lust and has a 20 second period which feels like the heaviest we’ve ever sounded. Pretty sure this was the first song we started tracking off of the album.

A Feedback Loop Of Laughter
This song began when Sam coined the phrase, though he now can’t remember ever saying it now! This was the first track we recorded using a 1970s echoplex, it ended up not being the last.

Shimmer
This is one of the oldest songs on the album, but one we always seem to come back to. I remember trying to write a song that the Beatles would write with fuzz pedals, but ended up getting nowhere near.

Love Me Sinister
Definitely a song written on a downer and one that doesn’t even have the energy to have more than two chords. It’s pretty sludgy and monotonous, but that’s how it seems to work. We haven’t really played it at any of our gigs yet, but when we do there’ll definitely be the temptation to drag it out for 20 minutes!

Paint
The oldest song on the album. Written in our late teens growing up in Reading. There’s a cut up airy sample which kind of hovers over the whole thing, we’ve used the same stem since the very first demo. It came on the plane to New York with us.

Under A Gelatine Moon
This song was originally called ‘Junk’ and started as a sludgy home acoustic demo. It ended up changing quite a bit. It now has one of our favourite guitar sounds we’ve ever managed to get. Using one of those old Ampeg guitar amps, one in particular that used to belong to Elliott Smith, although we didn’t know it at the time.

Catherine, I Feel Sick
First song we ever wrote on a drum machine! We’ve always thought this song links a lot of our different sounding tracks, so it sits in quite a nice place on the record. It was written a while ago after going to party with some friends and realising that everybody had become different people.

Wisdom Teeth
We simply wanted to make this one as sparse as possible, and tried really hard not to make the chorus overbearing and over the top. The record is filled with re-recording stuff through a rotating leslie speaker, but it’s most apparent on this track on the second verse vocals.

Tin Foil Skin
We started with the bass line and after months of jamming made something that we could call a song. Up until a week before we recorded it wasn’t going to be on the album but luckily just before we went to the US on our final play through of what we were thinking of trying, it clicked and seemed to work. We’re now really glad it made it on to the record.

Slow Mo
The easiest option when recording this would have been to swamp it in reverb, but instead we decided to make it as dry as possible. I remember Nicolas [Verhnes, producer] playing David Bowie’s ‘Five Years’ over and over again as a drum sound reference. The instrumentation on this is very simple, just drums, bass, guitar, organ and vocals. That said, burried in the recording is the literal sound of static from Jupiter which we found in an archive. It’s always the little things that make you smile.

‘Spacehopper’ is out 17th June via Frenchkiss. Stream the album exclusively on DIY below.



Tripwires launch their debut album with a show at Camden Barfly, 20th June.