Pulled Apart By Horses are set to play Manchester’s Sound Control after the release of their forthcoming album The Haze (due out 17 March).
The Haze was written at the beginning of 2016, when the members of Pulled Apart By Horses, Tom Hudson, James Brown, bassist Robert Lee and new drummer Tommy Davidson, an old friend recruited from Leeds noise rockers These Monsters, decamped from their lock-up rehearsal facility in their native Leeds to a tiny, remote cottage on a dairy farm in the Welsh countryside for 10 days.
To say there was nothing to distract them seems an understatement. “When we first got to the cottage we thought ‘There’s nothing to do here!’” says James. “But that was precisely the point. There was no internet, no emails, no-one checking how we were getting on. We were writing for no-one but ourselves. We became like a little family – cooking for one another, building fires, holding late-night karaoke competitions – and completely immersed ourselves in the music.”
Recording took place in Sheffield at Ross Orton’s (Arctic Monkeys / MIA / Drenge) McCall Sound Studio, where the band laid down the twelve tracks of noise-pop, with influences taken from the likes of The Stooges, Black Sabbath, QOTSA and T-Rex. “When we were making our previous album Blood we were referencing a lot of Ross’s work, so it made sense to go straight to the source, and it was great to see him investing so much in the process” Rob reveals. “Ross essentially became a fifth member of the band for a month,” adds James.
Speaking of the influences (Krautrock and Surf-Pop can also be found in the mix), Tom Hudson commented “Our musical tastes change monthly, never mind over the course of five years, so we are never going to be the kind of band who’d do the same album every time,” adds Hudson. “We’ve always been that band that are ‘too heavy for the indie kids, and too indie for the heavy kids’ in industry terms, but it’s quite cool that people don’t really know where to put is, because it means no-one can easily slap a genre name upon us. Now we have the freedom to just be who we are.”
Pulled Apart By Horses play at Manchester’s Sound control on 6 April 2017.
