It’s been a quiet few years for alt-J, which wrapped up its Relaxer tour in late 2018 and then went back to the lab for what has turned out to be its first album in five years.
As keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton notes, it was almost enough downtime to make him forget what his day job was.
During that break, he and frontman Joe Newman also were introduced to the wonders of fatherhood, making the touring life of a rock star seem even more distant.
Last week, the British trio that defines quirky reemerged with “The Dream,” an often melancholic and reflective fourth effort with sonic gifts that suggest the time off was used well.
Now alt-J, which won the coveted British Mercury Prize in 2012 for its delightfully weird debut album “An Awesome Wave,” will head out on an arena tour that launches in Pittsburgh on Feb. 25, at the Petersen Events Center.
This week, we talked to Hamilton, at home in England, about the long-awaited return of alt-J.
Q: The last time we talked, you were coming to Mr. Smalls on that first tour. Did you ever foresee alt-J rising to this arena level?
A: It’s hard to say, really. It was a pretty great first tour for us. We certainly felt like we were onto something special. We had this amazing reception from everyone in America. That was a very nice thing, so I wouldn’t say we felt like we were going to come back and play arenas, but I think we knew we were onto something good. We found a country that really loved us.
Q: It looks like you guys haven’t played a real show since July 2019 [at a festival]. What’s it been like not playing for so long?
A: It’s been strange. Sometimes I’ve sort of questioned whether I’m still a musician or not. You know, I haven’t done my day job, we haven’t had a proper tour since 2018, and obviously COVID kept throwing us these disappointing things and we’re hearing, all the time, “Has it been canceled? Has it been postponed? Is the tour going to happen?” I was kind of sitting here on bad days thinking, “At what point do we just give it up?!” But, here we are, going to America in two days, and feeling so good about it, so I’m excited to be back on tour. And we’ve been rehearsing loads, we’ve brushed away all the rest, we’ve polished it up and the old car is looking and smelling fantastic.
Q: What can people expect from this, production wise, virtually?
A: I don’t wanna give too much away but I will say it will be three-dimensional. That’s my clue for you. We obviously haven’t seen with our own eyes what the production will look like. We’ve seen a lot of 3-D renderings and such and it looks mind-blowing. We start production rehearsals next week and I’m absolutely beside myself with excitement because it looks so good, better than anything we’ve done before and unlike anything I’ve ever seen from anyone’s production, so, yeah, I’m buzzing for it, and everybody should come see it.
Q: When I did a Google news search of alt-J, in the first story Joe was saying he’ll never be a guitar player like John Mayer, which is funny because John Mayer is playing here the same night as you, like a mile away, at the arena.
A: Interesting, interesting, well there you go. People have got the choice. We need to leave it up to them to make the right choice.
Q: Given what he said, what is your assessment? Have you guys grown as musicians?
A: We’ve grown and I think we’re also still playing off the original chemistry that we had, that we discovered when we had our first band practice. We hit upon something really special when we sat down and played our instruments together and that big bang, the echoes are still being felt throughout the alt-J universe. At the same time, we’ve expanded what we do. I’m playing bass on four tracks on this album, Joe has become a guitarist on a whole new level on this album, and Thom [Green, the drummer] is adding strings to his bow quicker than you can say “strings.” He’s playing all kinds of things on this record, so it’s really exciting to see how fluid our roles have become in the band now.
Q: How do you guys go about crafting an album? Do you talk about what direction it will take, what it’s going to sound like?
A: Not really. It’s pretty organic. It’s about sitting down and looking through what we’ve done on tour, jams and things like that, songs that we’ve been working on on the road and, you know, shoveling through stuff we’ve been working on at home as well. When it comes to recording with our producer, Charlie Andrew, he has a big influence on what the record ends up sounding like. And this time it was all about this 1960s Vox AC30 amp that he’s got, which we just reamped everything through on the album, to give the whole thing a beautiful kind of dusty vintage warmth and it really colored the album in a lovely way.
Q: Do you encounter situations where you come up with something and say “That’s not alt-J”?
A: I think it’s the opposite. I think we encounter things, occasionally, where we say, “Hmm, this sounds like a past piece of alt-J. We need to change this or sort of move on from this.” It doesn’t happen too much, but it has happened before where, occasionally, we fall into the trap of writing what I guess is an easy alt-J song. But really I think almost nothing is off-limits as far as what can sound like alt-J and what can be an alt-J song. On this album there is opera, there is barbershop, there’s post-punk, Krautrock, shoegaze, there’s house music, so many different kinds of genres that we’re dipping our toes into, and that’s a real exciting thing and that’s why we’re all still so committed to this project.
Q: This is the longest you’ve spent on an album. How did COVID impact the process?
A: The main thing was just that it gave us more time. Once it became clear that we were living through a strange time of lockdowns, all ideas of deadlines went out the window and we were able to just go, “OK, look, all that’s rough here, and who knows what anybody else is going to be doing, but let’s just take the time we want to take on this album and see what happens,” and so, as it happened, we were in the studio a year and a half, on and off, with lockdowns and what have you. It was a really nice healthy lifestyle, doing a few weeks writing, a couple weeks recording, back and forth between those two things, and there were some long breaks as well for the lockdowns, which I think were good for us just to clear our heads a bit and not get studio stir-craziness.
Q: And you became fathers during that time. Congrats.
A: Thank you.
Q: How does that change things?
A: It’s kind of a double-edged sword because it makes going on tour all the more difficult, because it’s going to be sad going away from home and leaving my family at home, but on the other hand, it’s a reason to go on tour, it’s a reason to provide for my family, bring home the bacon, so it cuts both ways.
Q: I want to ask you about a couple specific songs. “Get Better” is one of the first COVID songs I’ve heard. How did that song come to life?
A: It started off with Joe kind of improvising a song to sing to his partner at home. It was just something he was sort of noodling, improvising on guitar. She ended up filming him and sending him the video, and he kept it in the bottom drawer for a couple of years, and then during the pandemic he picked it up again. It seemed very prescient, this whole chorus of “Get better, my darling,” and he kind of wrote a song around it that was inspired by the pandemic. I think in a way that song was waiting for the right time, and the appropriate time was coronavirus, in this whole period of loss and grief that the whole world has been going through the last few years.
Q: Did you like it right away?
A: I did like it. It made me cry right away. That’s the power of the song. A lot of people I played it to cried as well. I think it’s a very emotionally honest song. It’s a potent one, that’s for sure.
Q: “Hard Drive Gold,” which is about crypto, I saw a reviewer mention this being a shot at something more of a commercial banger for you guys.
A: Yeah, we’ve never been afraid of writing a commercial song, going back to “Left Hand Free.” We’ve always known we had this ability to write a really radio-friendly song when we feel like it. But if we try to do that for 12 songs on an album it wouldn’t be alt-J. I think the fact that it’s folded into an album that’s full of dark, strange tales, that’s why it works. It’s part of a broader buffet of emotions on the album.
Q: “Philadelphia” surprises us with an opera singer, and it sounds like the song is about an incident … in Philadelphia.
A: It’s a song that’s a bit of a dark noir crime … almost like an East Coast Raymond Chandler song, hard-boiled noir detective 1950s story about a murder on the dark, rainy streets of Philadelphia under the lamplights. But in terms of the opera singer idea that Joe had, I was a bit hesitant at first. I was like, “Oh god, I don’t want it to sound like the Freddie Mercury ‘Barcelona’ song. That’s not the vibe.” But, actually, she came in and we decided to treat her voice like it was a sample from an actual opera. It’s chopped and made to sound like we taped it off the radio. That’s why it works for me. People have been like, “What opera is that from?” and I’m like, “It’s not from an opera, it’s an original alt-J sample.” It’s a cool thing, I think, that it kind of confuses people.
Q: And then it is paired with “Chicago,” which is a much more soothing song, a more tranquil experience.
A: Yes, “Chicago” is a funny one because it’s kind of like a house music song. If you take away the repetitive kick drum and the string stamps and things and leave just the vocals and guitar, it’s actually kind of a country- and-western song, so it’s kind of one thing disguised as another, really.
Q: Given your position in the indie scene, as an acclaimed Mercury Prize winner, how much pressure do you feel making a record … for a pretty tough crowd?
A: I think at this point we’re just grateful to be doing the job that we do, where we’ve had an amazing amount of success. All the things that we’ve achieved can never be taken away from us, so if we continue to achieve things like that, then that’s fantastic. And if we don’t, we’ve had a great time and will keep making music as long as we have an audience, so we’re not too worried, really.
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