Wild Beasts: DIY’s August cover stars revealed

With summer’s end fast approaching, Wild Beasts are clinging onto the Texan heat. New album ‘Boy King’ is a steamy, sweaty product of a Transatlantic trip, and as cover stars of DIY’s August issue, they take us into the fiery pit from whence it came. It’s a world away from last album ‘Present Tense’, that’s for sure.

“I think there was a bottleneck, in terms of our craft,” frontman Hayden Thorpe admits with a laugh, while guitarist Ben Little cites the “element of surprise” that keeps his favourite bands relevant – “we want to shock you and keep you interested in that way.”

“If we’d have followed the line of design of ‘Present Tense’, it’s like music by maths,” says Hayden. “It was so meticulous and so detailed, and we went to such extraordinary lengths to construct it. It was either that – we start putting the lab coats on - or we put the leather jackets on. And of course you put the leather jackets on!”

Elsewhere, we catch up with Class Of 2016 star Nao on the eve of her debut album ‘For All We Know’’s release, delve into the influence of Twin Atlantic’s Glasgow home town on ‘GLA’, sit down with Angel Olsen to talk humanity, and head to La La Land with the evermore bonkers Glass Animals.

Warpaint also give us the lowdown on that mysterious ‘Heads Up’ business, Alt-J drummer-gone-solo Thom Sonny Green opens up on ‘High Anxiety’, and there’s Neu chats with Dream Wife, Will Joseph Cook and Mabel.

As always, there’s a metric tonne more crammed in there as well.