Before their Leeds gig, Natasha Lyons caught up with We Are The Ocean’s Liam Cromby (vocalist/guitarist), Jack Spence (bassist) and Alfie Scully (guitarist) to discuss their latest album Ark, their new sound and reconnecting with the fans and wider music world.
Four-piece outfit We Are The Ocean are back on a UK headline tour after a transitional period of one off shows, new management and a summer of festivals.
The band’s sound has changed considerably since their 2010 debut album, Cutting Our Teeth. Looking back, the band admit to “enjoying playing [the older songs] more now […] even though they were written four or five years ago you can still put yourself in the same headspace”. In choosing the setlist for the current tour, the band muse that there were a couple of older songs that stood out like ‘What it Feels Like’ and ‘Playing My Heart’ “which we didn’t really play much at the time […] but we really enjoyed jamming them out again”. Revisiting some of the older songs is proving to be a rewarding and nostalgic part of their reintroduction to the fans and has seemed to revive the band’s excitable spirit in their live shows.
After a developmental second album, with now former vocalist Dan Brown, it was clear that the band were naturally moving away from the post-hardcore scene of their formation days and enticing something more towards streamlined anthemic rock. Liam muses “naturally for us it felt right to progress in that way” to which Jack adds that “it’s about feeling natural with it and not forcing anything into a box or overthinking what it should or shouldn’t sound like”.
Released in May 2015, latest album Ark is a guitar rock album at heart and is their most nuanced and ambitious album yet. Influences range far and wide, but most interestingly “country is definitely underlining” as Liam explains “we all like a bit of The Eagles and I was brought up with little bits of Johnny Cash so that’s always there”. The album artwork also has some surprising influences and cuts a striking image. The crowned half tiger half indiscriminate beast is the creation of the artist who designed Father John Misty’s ‘Fear Fun’ album which caught the attention of the band who “love how vibrant and original his stuff is”. The album cover succeeds in encapsulating their new experimentation as the band strives to not just be “one among the crowd”.
As one of the leading bands of the current and upcoming rock scene, We Are The Ocean talk about rock’s place among the pop and dance dominated mainstream and camaraderie within the music community. “I would genuinely like to see a tour where you saw English bands come together – somewhere where’s there’s camaraderie and everyone can just jam together”. There’s a definite emphasis on just jamming out and feeling the music, rather than seeing other bands and artists as competition. Liam recounts a recent My Morning Jacket gig: “the support band, The Dawes, came on stage at the end and they all had a jam together […] Marcus Mumford was there as well and he came onstage to have a jam too”. It’s an unexpected combination of artists but shows how music should be with “no real walls or boundaries”.
Above all else, what shines through is the band’s integrity which Alfie pinpoints later on by saying that their writing and recording process is driven more by the band’s instincts, prioritising “staying true to [them] selves” as a band rather than fashioning something that sounds like a combination of other artists or focusing on drawing in the masses. There’s a kind of personality in what We Are The Ocean are doing by appealing to individuals in their music, seeing inspiring “another person to write a song or pick up a guitar […] as rewarding doing it yourself”.
Despite their play on Radio 1, Liam notes that rock music “is still not in the forefront as it may have been years before”. The band are grounded and modest in the way in which they see their impact and relevance as rock musicians, stating that “there’s not a pressure to do something big, we’re just carrying on doing our thing and hopefully that can help out some way for the rock scene”. Although they underplay their influence, it is exactly this unassuming attitude that adds to their charm and appeal. In a music world that is saturated by pressure – to sell mountainous volumes of records, to look a certain way, to get so many top ten singles – it is refreshing to meet a band who seem detached from the cynical music industry, and are instead contently focused on striving to progress their music and inspire people, with their integrity still intact.
Looking to what’s next, it seems the band have learnt a lot from their ranging directions on previous records and “want to get all that into one album”. Aspirations for new music seem to coincide with the overarching things that draw all the albums together: “songs that people can sing along to, that can put people in a time and place, and have a lot of feel to them”. We Are The Ocean’s bold, yet concentrated, intentions leave an exciting prospect for the future.
Natasha Lyons