Alt-J: DIY’s September cover stars revealed!

Successfully bedded into a bean bag? Finished licking that crisp packet? Good - now listen carefully. Alt-J are September’s DIY coverstars, and they’ve been given tins of paint, some triangles and anything else they can get their free hands on.

This month’s cover feature brings together Big Topics like Gary Barlow and the Illuminati, all while whittling down to the all important subject: The madness behind Alt-J’s second album, ‘This Is All Yours’.

Alt-J are adamant that far from being removed from their debut sound, their second album ‘This Is All Yours’ isn’t taking them to a drastic new place; experimenting has always been in their blood, and a number of songs on the record have been kicking around for several years.

The bat-shit crazy lyrics to ‘Every Other Freckle’, for example, have been floating around frontman Joe Newman’s cranium since the early days of playing local pubs in their university town of Leeds. “Thom was talking about how a spider was bedding into his brain,” explains Joe, gazing across the park. “I was like… wow, bedding. I was telling my ex-girlfriend about this song two years ago, because it was written then, and she said it reminded her of this poem [‘I Wanna Be Yours’]. ‘I want to be your park bench, I want to be your heater while you sleep’ - that one. So, anyway, it sounds like I took that idea and went in a different direction, but I didn’t. So actually,” he laughs, “I’m as good as [John Cooper Clarke]”.

Riding on the momentum left over from the massive, runaway success of ‘An Awesome Wave’ made an eventual transition easier, no doubt. “We felt vindicated by the success of the first album,” nods Gus. “I think it gave us the right kind of boost of confidence that didn’t tip into cockiness,” adds Joe, “and I think that made us play better together. We refined our chemistry, and it matured into the second album because we understood that people liked what we’d done.”

Read the full cover feature in this month’s DIY, out 5th September.