Drenge have “expanded the dynamic” for second album

If you happened to be lucky enough to catch one of Drenge’s two live appearances earlier this week, you may have noticed something slightly different. While for the past two years, the Loveless brothers have pummelled their way through songs at a blistering pace all by themselves, now they’ve got themselves a third member: a bassist.

It’s not just a happy accident for their first shows of 2015 either; while working on their sophomore record, the follow-up to their 2013 self-titled debut, they decided to add that third element to the mix. “Yeah, we’ve been putting bass parts down,” drummer Rory Loveless told DIY, during the final stages of perfecting their album, “just to fill out the songs, and we will be playing with a third live member next time we play a show.”

As for how they came to that decision, it felt like the next natural progression. “I didn’t feel like it was going stale,” he pauses, “but we were both wondering where it was gonna go next after the first album. There’s a specific dynamic to it and I don’t know how long I could’ve kept doing that. Plus, for the audience, when you’re playing two hours worth of material for the live show, that sound is just so grating on the ears, so we’ve expanded the dynamic and gotten our mate to play bass for us. I think the tunes are a lot more subtle, I think is probably the word and, I guess, we’ve probably gone a bit more traditional. It’s been fun and interesting to do, because we’ve never done that before, but it came fairly easily and I think it sounds really cool.”