Interview 60 Seconds With: Grouplove

With their penchant for sugar-coated, summer-filled pop, Grouplove have taken their sweet time about making their debut album. With ‘Never Trust A Happy Song’ about to hit the shelves, Harriet Jennings caught up with lead singer Christian Zucconi.

Your debut album opens with the track ‘Itchin’ On A Photograph’, which is all about just going for it and not looking back. The subject seems to reflect the band’s beginnings, was that intentional?
It was definitely to do with the band and leaving so much behind to make it happen. It just sort of came out that way. Sometimes you look back on lyrics after you write them down and it starts making sense. When you’re writing and certain circumstances are happening, if you can write them down and encapsulate them without really trying, it’s just an honest reflection of what’s happening in your life at the time. And that’s what ‘Itchin” is.

Only two tracks from your previous EP have made it on to the album. Was it important to you to have new tracks to show how you’d grown as a group?
It was super important. There are so many songs but we just wanted to keep it as minimal as possible. We kept ‘Colours’ and ‘Naked Kids’ because those were just two that got a great reaction, and you hope that when people hear your album they’ll actually want to hear more music and go back to your older work.

Hannah takes on vocal duties on a few of the album tracks. Can we expect you to rotate roles more in the future?
Yeah, there’s no rhyme or reason about that. Hannah came with two songs to the album that we all really liked. Sean sings one, Andrew sings one so I think it’s going to just be like that from now on; everyone will take their turn singing as long as it’s a song that we all like.

You’re all songwriters and must some- times bring pretty specific ideas to the table. How do you come together and compromise to make tracks work?
The album’s pretty organic, pretty effortless, which makes us really lucky. Usually we have arrangement or speed issues. A couple of songs I’d written for the album were a little punkier, a little faster. I took them to Ryan and he was like, ‘Let’s try this a little reggae with a slowed down beat’ and things changed direction. If anyone brings in something, which everyone is free to, we’ve never got to the point where they’re really upset because they’ve compromised too much. We’ve all been pretty open to it. Usually, if you stay open to it and trust other people, it will turn out being a lot better.

Do you consider yourselves a career band, and if so, what would you like to be remembered for?
We do consider ourselves a career band. We just want to keep on putting out good music and keep changing it up. We really believe it’s all about the survival by song mentality, and we have so many songs - we could pretty much release album two now, if we wanted to! We would never just want to be a flash in the pan, we want to make this our jobs. This is what we love to do. It’s the only thing we really know how to do, so we want to keep it up.

Grouplove’s debut album ‘Never Trust A Happy Song’ is out now via Warner.

Taken from the Autumn 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.