Interview Darkest Before The Dawn: Biffy Clyro

“So, what’s the good stuff?” ponders Biffy Clyro’s James Johnston of the last 18 months, chuckling down the phone from his Scottish home. “The good stuff is that we have had moments together as a threesome, as a band, [where] we’ve done some really incredible things. We did a livestream from the Barrowlands, which I think was one of the best live performances we’ve ever done, we’ve been involved in loads of other projects, and we’ve made another record,” he casually mentions. “What I’ve been reminded of is that when life is tough, this is a shelter, our band. It gives us purpose, it gives us drive.”

Having been plunged into lockdown last year just as they were beginning the promotional schedule for their eighth record - the almost ironically-titled ‘A Celebration of Endings’ - it feels like barely a moment has passed since Biffy were last delivering us new music. But while the interim 18 months have included more than their fair share of worry and frustration for James and his bandmates - singer Simon Neil and drumming brother Ben Johnston, the pandemic has evidently provided some considerable positives.

Originally planned to act as a companion record to their last album, building around offcuts of material from previous recording sessions, what’s now turned into LP9 began to take on a life of its own when the band convened at their Ayrshire farm studio.

“It’s slightly pixelated to me,” James admits, thinking back to when the album first really started to take shape. “There is still a relationship to ‘Celebration…’, there’s no doubt about it with some of the songs. But there’s this one song on the record where we got together in the practice room, and Simon came in… It starts, and is heavily based around the sound of a synthesiser - which is becoming a little more frequent for the band - but it still feels like new territory. It still feels really exciting when Simon’s like, ‘Right, we’re gonna plug in that fucking computer, and let’s see…’

“For me, that would be one of the points where it felt like the record had taken a shift,” he continues. “That was a couple of months before we actually started to record, and at that point, we were still talking about [it as] a sister record. But I think when you get a new song, it invariably starts to inform the older songs around it, and it sparks new ideas. It just gave us a feel for the colour of the record. So, there’s definitely still a relationship to ‘Celebration…’, [and] lyrically, I feel like there’s a connection. It was a real natural, organic process; things changed and evolved.”