Pills, Ills and Bellyaches

When the Wombats released their debut album in 2007, they were keeping undeniably similar company in the UK charts, next to guitar bands like The Fratellis, The View and The Pigeon Detectives. While their follow-up, the triumphant This Modern Glitch, veers somewhat from the tried and tested indie-pop blueprint (remember, in 2007, synthesisers were played only by paint-dripped Brazilians), they’ve chosen to resurrect the fiery riffs and catchy refrains. It’s the kind of cocky, freewheeling pop-rock that you just don’t hear in 2011.

Without a cutting-edge new sound to show for it, you might wonder why it took The Wombats four years to come up with a second album, but a quick spin of current single ‘Anti-D’ explains it in one handy, four-minute, radio-friendly nugget.
‘I’ve thrown away my citalopram’, croons po-faced singer Matthew Murphy, in celebration of his victory over a serious addiction to anti-depressants, ‘I need more than what was in those forty milligrams.’
“It’s a much more angsty album than our first,” Murphy tells me, right before their show in Dublin’s Academy. “At the start of the writing process, lots of distortion pedals got pressed and lots of cymbals got slayed. That was good, we needed to get some kind of anger out.”
“On some of the songs on the album you can still find elements of that,” adds Norwegian-born bassist Tord Øverland-Knudsen, “but maybe not as brutal as they were in the demo stage.”
“It took time,” Murphy admits. “It pretty much took a year before things started flowing again. In 2009, three or four songs came out, and the rest was 2010.”
“We had time to just experiment and push ourselves a little bit and have a bit of fun with it as well,” Øverland-Knudsen says, before backtracking a little. “Well, sometimes not that much fun, I guess, but it was definitely important to get some of those songs out.”
The last three years have been discernibly difficult for the Liverpool lads, but Murphy points out that an extended break from the tour van left him with the strongest withdrawal symptoms.
“After the first album, it was like a massive comedown when it all stopped. You miss the adrenaline each night. Every day had its purpose, and the purpose was the show at 9.30pm, or whatever. Then that gets taken away from you and you feel a bit confused.”
“You do miss it big time,” drummer Dan Haggis adds. “You’re told where to go and where to be all the time and it’s a routine that’s kind of laid out for you.”
This Modern Glitch has yet to be released when they hit the Academy stage – how have the punters been receiving the new material?
“We were just talking about that earlier,” Haggis says. “When we released our first album, no-one had heard anything, so I guess this is a mix of having people going absolutely mental to songs but then going back to those early days when you have to win the crowd over.”
“Planting the time bomb.” Murphy nods.
“Yeah, it’s a good challenge, but it seems to be working.”
The Wombats were hardly taking the current soundscape into consideration for album number two (although, with Rihanna, Bruno Mars and Jessie J all filling seats in the Top 10, who could blame them?), but they did take some risks on the production end of things, drafting in pop specialist Butch Walker, Ireland’s Jacknife Lee and bizarrely, heavy metal man Eric Valentine to twiddle the knobs.
“We initially didn’t want to work with him because of his back catalogue,” Murphy admits, referring to Valentine’s work with rock demons like Queens Of The Stone Age and Slash. “The label really pushed us. They really wanted us to work with him and we were like ‘Ugh, really? Okay, we’ll try something out,’ and it’s the best thing we ever did, really.”
“He brings the best of both,” Haggis says, “the creative musician side and the geeky producer side. And he was really chilled out, he just came on his own, he barely uses assistants, he just gets in dead early and works his arse off.”
For the album artwork, the trio turned to legendary graphic designer Storm Thorgerson, who delivered a shot of a group of beach-dwellers covering their faces with a picture of a chaise longue.
“It’s the idea of such a happy setting,” Murphy explains, “having a picnic on a beach or whatever, but everybody’s a bit fucked up. I guess the couch represents some kind of psychotherapy we all need.
‘I guess it refers to the album title… some kind of inner conflict. That was something that I was definitely feeling throughout the course of the album.”
Before I release the boys to a heaving Academy massive, I want to ask about forthcoming single ‘Techno Fan’, which teams a scuzzy synthline with hard-hitting lyrics like, “Don’t you know I’d chop a limb off just to have a good time?”
“It was about a night I went to in Shoreditch, a minimal techno night,” Murphy recalls, fumbling on his words a little. “The song seems to be quite needy and quite sad to me… about finding a place that you really didn’t wanna escape from, but I guess… I don’t know, I still can’t understand it…”