INTERVIEW: Sound of the Sirens on Damage Control

With their new album – Damage Control – out now, we interview Sound of the Sirens about the new album, the evolution of their sound and more. Listen to the record here. 

 

Hi, how are you?

Oh, good, thank you. I’ve got a four month old little girl and I’m still learning to structure my day around her.

Good luck! Obviously, you’ve got the album coming out – how are you feeling? It must feel very surreal.

We’re so excited that it’s finally happening because a lot of these songs started to come to life in 2020. We were gigging at the end of 2019 with the intention of bringing this out around 2020 – going away and writing it and then obviously that never happened. The last two years have been writing songs and getting material together and then slowly by the end of that year, gigs started to come back and in 2021, people were gigging but there was still a bit of trepidation around people going into venues and things. I can’t believe that it’s here and there are actual CDs floating around. It’s finally real.

How did it come together? Talking about it coming together in 2020, is it difficult sometimes to put yourself back in that headspace – two years ago seems like a very different world to what it is now.

Yeah I mean two years ago, we did this split screen gig where I recorded my part, acting like Hannah was there and then I sent her the video. She watched the video and played back to it, and then we slotted the two pieces of it together.It was so funny, it didn’t work, but it worked. It was so bad. It was around that time that we were writing songs that we hoped would be on the album. I think it will be interesting to play these songs live when we go out on tour in a few weeks trying to remember where they came from. Songs like ‘Damage Control’ were written a long time ago.

That song feels even more pertinent now…

Yeah, and that’s just the thing. I think all of the songs on Damage Control – there were 11 tracks and it wasn’t intentional that we wrote 11 tracks about different emotions, but it just so happened that the songs came out that way. They had a bit of a snowball effect that they were tenuously linked without us knowing. Damage Control is the one that addresses all of the different emotions that we need to get through the day – the bad and the good. I think like you said, more than ever now the world’s kind of going back to normal, but it’s not. There’s things going on all over the place, we’re still going through that spectrum of emotions that we talked about on the title track.

I want to go back to the beginning, because obviously, there’s so much instrumentation, there’s so many harmonies, there’s so much rich musical heritage going through your music. Can you talk about how you guys met and your different musical paths and how this came together? I can imagine both of you being as talented as you are, it must be an adjustment period and working out where you’re both going to sit on each track.

Thank you – to begin with… Hannah is just slightly older than me by a couple of years. Hannah was studying music at college. She was doing music theatre in North Devon, I was studying performing arts or college here in Exeter. We both met working in a nightclub in Exeter. We joined the function band, where we were singing all the harmonies and all the songs you can imagine being played at weddings and learned to harmonise. We did that for a couple of years and then started to do our own covers. We had enough material and one or two originals that we thought ‘let’s be brave and try and do our own thing’. We approached our boss and asked for a Thursday night slot. We kept going from there until we had enough originals to not have to do this anymore. I think our backgrounds very different – Hannah was always in bands with her dad, always the front girl singer of the band, whereas I was more into performance. Although it was quite minimal the work that I did and I had no experience – I had some stage experience but no experience performing in a pub or club or any music venue. It was a very different world for me and the first time we went to record, I’d never done anything like that.

In terms of our musicality, we match on a lot of things – Mumford and Sons was so influential to us – and nowadays we are both obsessed with First Aid Kit. We love Florence & The Machine, Lana Del Rey but then we’ve got some real classics that we love as well, like Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton and then some secret guilty pleasures like Hanson – Hannah is the world’s biggest Hanson fan.

I know you guys are always referred to as a folk act, but listening to the album your sound feels much broader than that…

I think we were labelled as a folk act early on, because when we self-released our first album, there was mandolin on maybe a couple of songs on those EP, and then people think they are folk because we’ve got a mandolin. I remember we went to the Cambridge Folk Festival to play in it and we felt out of place. There were some incredible acts, but we didn’t feel that we belonged. I don’t know that we are folk and these proper folk acts know we’re not. This album, for a start, has zero mandolin. This album has more of an Americana feel, with darker elements in it – that is probably the influence of Saul Davies.

How did he come to be a part of the project and what did he bring to the project? 

Well, we met him in Exeter, he’s part of a massive group. They were part of an event called Music Feeds, which is an ongoing appeal, they’re always generating funds and money and trying to help different groups. We were part of the event that was filmed at Cavern in Exeter. Jill Ellis invited us to come along, and we met Saul. I think we walked in and were like ‘he’s the big cheese.’ You hear these names of people that have this huge back catalogue of music, but he’s so funny and so down to earth and we instantly got on with him. We had this really fun afternoon chatting with him, I mentioned that we’d written these tracks and if I sent them to him, would he mind listening? That was all that we hoped for. He sent this message through saying he’d listened to the songs and would like to produce the album. We would have been stupid to say no.

We went to Scotland where he’s based, he has this really isolated house in the Highlands. We were able to record in his little studio. It was amazing, it was such a great experience. He was very honest as well. He listened to the songs and some of them he was enthusiastic about straight away and then other songs he would listen to and go, what is that? What were you thinking?

What are you most excited for people to hear from the project and what are you excited for in terms of the release?

I’m really excited that we’ve got Lucy Piper working with us – she’s the drummer that’s coming on tour with us. We obviously have our normal live setup  – a converted floor bass drum, but in no way can we replicate what a drummer can do. We wanted to have a drummer and then we came across Lucy, who lives locally here in Exeter, and we’ve been rehearsing with her. She’s so good. She’s listened to this album, so well and she’s just a brilliant talent.

Well, I’m super excited for you guys for this project to be out and to go on tour finally. 

Thank you.